Staffing Issues, Move to Centers Causing Delays in Drawback Claim Processing, CBP Officials Say

FORT LAUDERDALE -- Delays drawback filers are seeing in claims processing are related to a variety of factors, including a reorganization of CBP’s drawback staff and understaffing at certain key drawback centers, but importers can follow certain best practices to speed the process along, CBP officials and drawback experts said during a panel discussion June 15.

In the wake of the move of drawback to the Centers of Excellence and Expertise in September 2021 (see 2108160018), claims began to be assigned to the Center corresponding to the filer, which provide some advantages in the form of an established hierarchy and product-specific expertise, said Greg Olavsky, director of trade operations at CBP’s Office of Field Operations, during a panel discussion at the American Association of Exporters and Importers annual conference. Once a drawback filer gets assigned to a Center, the process is seamless and the Center takes over all communication and processing.

But for unassigned filers submitting a drawback claim to one of the four old drawback centers, CBP personnel must manually assign the claim to a Center. That process includes research and communication with the receiving Center, and eventually filling out a form to get the claim transferred, said David McGurk, director of CBP’s petroleum, natural gas and minerals Center in Houston, during the same panel discussion.

McGurk said he was “mentioning all this because I know that you're like, ‘Why are these claims being processed? There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you all might not be seeing,” he said.

A major factor affecting processing time since the transition is an unbalanced workload, with three Centers -- apparel, footwear and textiles in San Francisco; pharmaceuticals, health and chemicals in New York; and automotive and aerospace in Detroit -- handling 75 percent of claims, said Greg Olavsky, director of trade operations at CBP’s Office of Field Operations. Those centers are also “downstaffed,” Olavsky said, giving the example of the apparel Center, which has three drawback vacancies, putting them “behind the 8-ball in terms of staffing.”

The problem is not just drawback, and cuts across CBP, Olavsky said. “We have not had an appreciable increase in staffing since the Homeland Security Act of 2002 for non-uniformed positions,” he said.

Filers also often do not quickly respond to drawback specialists’ requests for more information, McGurk said. If the specialist quickly receives the information they need, the claim is still fresh in their mind and can be quickly processed. But if it takes a long time to get that information, “it is not going to be fresh in their minds, and I can’t speak for everybody, but I’d have to start over,” he said.

One best practice to avoid hiccups is to make sure it has all the necessary information, McGurk said. “Sometimes it’s helpful if you draw pictures, [and] have a workflow process” to “make it as easy as possible for the person who receives your claim to see the same thing that you can,” he said.

Another is for new filers to find out which Center they’re assigned to before filing a claim, Michael Cerny of Charter Brokerage said. “If you can route it at the beginning to the right Center,” you can “avoid a lot of the issues” related to delays from behind-the-scenes work,” Cerny said. One option is to find out through the ES01 ACE report, which shows the teams that are handling the entries. If multiple Centers handle the entries, one Center often has the majority and will be the Center to which the filer is assigned, Cerny said.

For filers in cases in which the assigned Center isn’t so obvious, a bond query will return the assigned Center, and can be even faster than doing an ES01, Cerny said.