CPSC Set to Prioritize E-Commerce With Additional Staff at Express, Mail Facilities

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is moving forward with an expansion of its import program to focus on e-commerce and de minimis shipments, said Jim Joholske, director of CPSC’s Office of Import Surveillance, at CBP’s Virtual Trade Week July 22. Recent increases in funding for the agency means CPSC now has the resources to focus on small shipments, and will allow CPSC to staff express carrier, air cargo and international mail facilities with import personnel, he said.

CPSC’s import surveillance work has traditionally been focused on larger shipments, but the agency “has not been blind to how commerce has changed dramatically around us,” Joholske said “We just simply did not have the resources to work an environment where large volumes of small shipments arrive,” he said. The recent funding increase “has changed that,” and associated legislation has mandated the CPSC begin to work at e-commerce facilities, he said.

CPSC’s commissioners approved a staff plan for allocating those new funds in April. Since then CPSC has been “aggressively recruiting new staff,” and in recent days the agency has brought on a group of new investigators that is going to be stationed at the ports. “In two weeks we’ve got another group coming on,” and CPSC expects “to continue that hiring into the future,” he said. “Over the immediate short-term, medium-term, our plan is to have CPSC staff actively working at express carrier, air cargo and international mail facilities,” Joholske said.

“As these are new environments for CPSC, we recognize there are going to be a number of challenges,” Joholske said. “Some are known at this point, some we are going to find as we dig deeper into this,” he said.

Staffing is one area where Joholske anticipates challenges. “We need to be able to maintain funding for the existing staff, and need to be able to secure funding for new staff in order to maintain and grow our program,” he said. Enforcement processes are another. CPSC’s tried-and-true methods of sampling potentially non-compliant shipments works with a container worth of product, but when CPSC is dealing with small shipments, “we need to be able to find a more efficient way to deal with the enforcement process,” Joholske said.

Risk assessment is a third area that could be problematic, Joholske said. “There’s an overwhelming number of e-commerce and small shipments that are arriving each day,” he said. CPSC needs the right data to perform risk assessments in this new environment. “That is certainly something that we’ve been in discussions with CBP about.”

And while CPSC’s future “is really expected to be focused on e-commerce, the recent funding increases that we’ve received have allowed us to expand operations in the traditional port environment,” Joholske said. CPSC has “some new ports for us that are coming online, and we look forward to working with CBP” and importers and brokers in the new areas, he said.

Meanwhile, CPSC is also working to get staff in place for its e-filing project, which been moving forward in fits and starts since 2011. Joholske said the trade community can expect to start hearing more on the agency’s PGA message set “early next year.” The commission is also set to roll out the next phase of its two-way messaging “in the coming weeks,” which will allow CPSC to send messages to the trade community to request documents through ACE, as well as to send notice of conditional release.