CBP Seeing Dramatic Increase in Type 86 Entries

CBP is trying to get a handle on a recent boom in Type 86 entries, said Jim Swanson of the Office of Cargo Security and Controls in the CBP Office of Field Operations. The dramatic increase in entries is causing slowdowns in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) and threatens to overwhelm the agency's ability to control the flow, he said. Swanson spoke on a May 8 conference call about the bottlenecking entries. With more than 30 million entries and nearing 40 million, “I believe Type 86 has now surpassed the number of formal entries filed in previous years” or is “awful close to it,” he said.

In the early months after being rolled out in October, CBP saw a “measured growth” of around doubling every month, he said. By the end of February, CBP had seen about 6 million total entries and “were doing very well.” In April, CBP saw another 6 million entries and was doing about 400,000 to 500,000 entries per day, which was “well within the capacities designed into the system.” Then, starting in May, that number grew to about 1.6 million to 1.8 million entries per day and “we began to see delays in our response times,” he said. While most of those entries were in the air mode, ocean shipments also began to grow, he said.

Swanson has been working with the Office of Information and Technology and the Trade Transformation Office “to see if there's something we can do to work together as a community to try and control the volume enough to keep it well within our scope of control,” he said. “We ask those that have the time to spread their time out, to try and balance their load a little bit so it doesn't all hit at the same time.” Asked about the causes of the increases, Swanson said the agency still needs to analyze the data over the growth.

The Office of Information and Technology is now trying to “separate out the Type 86 traffic from our normal flow of traffic to not impact the regular flow of cargo,” another CBP official with OIT said. CBP issued a CSMS message on May 7 that listed some new filing limits for the entry type.