CBP Allowing for AES Transportation Data Corrections Before Issuing Penalties

CBP is now operating under an “informed compliance umbrella” related to penalties over faulty “transportation data” included on Automated Export System filings, said Jim Swanson, director of the Cargo and Security Controls Division, for Cargo and Conveyance Security, CBP Office of Field Operations. Swanson, who spoke Feb. 10 during a National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones virtual conference, mentioned discrepancies with filed dates and ports as things CBP would like to see corrected rather than penalized. A set of penalty mitigation guidelines for failure to comply with Foreign Trade Regulations was updated in September.

Under the approach, “if we find things that are tied to the transportation that have changed and are not documented and not changed in the AES filing,” instead of issuing automated penalties, “we should be working to try and get that data corrected,” he said. “We will be notifying the parties, if the goods are still here and we discover [problems] prior to export, we will put a hold on those goods while the data is being corrected.” The hope is that CBP would then be able to release the hold that same day if the data is corrected, he said. If the shipment was already exported and there wasn't “an egregious violation” in the data provided, “we are looking at giving between 10 and 15 days to get that correction done from the day we notify you,” Swanson said. Only if there is no response or if the response is inadequate will CBP consider going to a “penalty regime,” he said.

The agency is continuing to look at how to improve the export filing process, including through FTZs. “Clearly, exports is a big deal going out of foreign-trade zones” as “a significant chunk of goods going out of the United States do come out of foreign-trade zones in terms of value,” he said. Through the ongoing Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee Export Modernization Working Group efforts, CBP hopes to “identify better and simpler ways to handle this process,” he said. For example, the group is working on a white paper “that clearly delineates what the new process for the 21st century export process should look like,” he said. “A key part of that was identifying which trade entity owns the data, which trade entity would be responsible for filing the data, which people would have interest in the data, and then which federal agencies” would collect or have access to that data, Swanson said.

CBP is “already working with Census, for example, to identify, as we roll out export manifest and make it mandatory, we worked as a group to help Census and others map out the things that need to go to the manifest side and not necessarily be mandatory or penalty-based data elements in the AES filing,” he said.