Updated 5106 Deployment 'No Earlier Than' March 7, CBP Official Says
CBP won’t go forward with its planned deployment of new Form 5106 until at least March 16, an agency official said on a call with members of the trade community. The agency has not yet set a date for the release, and may push the transition back even further depending on the level of readiness, he said on the Feb. 7 call. Testing is ongoing on the new Form 5106 in CBP’s ACE Certification environment, after deployment of the latest version of the importer ID form was delayed partly due to the recent partial federal government shutdown (see 1901170046).
The agency has work to do before it is ready for the deployment date, another CBP official said on the call. Last week, CBP had 246 attempts to file the updated form in testing, and only 30 of those were accepted, coming out to an acceptance rate of a little over 12 percent. Over the last nine weeks, 17 filers have attempted to file the new form more than 1,000 times, with only 93 of those accepted, she said. The agency official said she had not looked into the details as to why the filings were rejected.
One area where frequent questions have come up is in Section 3 of the draft form, which is an optional field for enhanced information on the importing company, including banking information, related entities and personal identifying information for corporate officers. The first official reiterated that these fields are almost always optional, with the exception being that a Social Security number must be provided if a company chose to provide a CBP-assigned number but an owner or beneficial officer has an SSN.
Nonetheless, the official urged the optional information in Section 3 to be provided for CBP risk assessment purposes. Importers unknown to CBP or those bringing in risky products could see their shipments slowed up or held if the detailed information is not provided, he said. But importers that have old Form 5106s “grandfathered” in and that have a history of compliance do not have to worry about their risk profile suddenly going up due to their failure to file a new 5106 with Section 3 filled out, and only need file the new form when they update their information, he said.
A new field for “program codes” will accept the entries CTPAT, ISA, AEO and PIP for the two U.S. Trusted Trader schemes as well as programs in Mexico and Canada, respectively, the official said. But that data is currently being collected for informational purposes only. CBP intends to link that field with data it collects through those programs so the information from a 5106 is combined with Trusted Trader program information for risk assessment purposes. Currently that information has to be linked manually, which can take some time and could mean that CBP considers a new Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) importer to be a higher risk due to leaving optional information out of the 5106, even though it the agency already has the importer’s information via CTPAT.
A list of importer of record numbers supplied for testing in a Feb. 6 CSMS message had some problems, so CBP will be issuing an updated set of IOR numbers for testing, likely early next week, the second CBP official said. CBP also will be putting out an updated Customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements (CATAIR) list with some issues fixed, as well as a new error dictionary, in the coming days. The agency will provide more information on the portal version of new Form 5106 soon, with a webinar scheduled for “no earlier than” March 7. From the trade community’s perspective, the portal transition will be seamless, and importers won’t have to request any new access privileges to go to the updated portal once it's deployed, she said.