CBP Has Drafted Rail EEM Mandate, Expects Uptick in Examinations, Official Says

CBP is inching closer to mandating electronic export manifest, with rail EEM the farthest along but air EEM still needing work, said David Garcia, program manager of the agency’s outbound enforcement and policy branch. Garcia said the agency is aiming to publish them in the Federal Register “within the next year or two.”

But he also said that timeline was optimistic.”For folks who are familiar with the government process,” Garcia said, ”that’s high expectations.”

Part of the delay in mandating EEM has been due to a lack of participation in its pilot programs (see 2110180038, 2207290035, 2209150014 and 2304270024). Garcia, speaking during the American Association of Exporters and Importers’ annual conference in Washington this week, said participation for air EEM has been particularly low, adding that the agency might “have to go forward with the air without as much pilot participation as we wanted.”

He was more hopeful about rail, saying CBP recently finished its “impact analysis portion” for rail EEM, and a draft rule has been packaged and “submitted for a formal review.” Ocean EEM is “not too far behind it.”

Even though pilot participation has been “relatively low,” Garcia said CBP recently saw a spike in participation after it informed industry last year that it would be ending the Document Imaging System submission process for ocean carriers to submit 1302A outbound cargo declarations (see 2209200080). “That lit a fire under the carriers,” Garcia said, although CBP recently extended the deadline to allow users to continue submitting the form (see 2303130012).

He also said he’s often asked by industry whether EEM will lead to an uptick in export examinations at ports. “We're not doing any exams now, so any increase on that is an increase,” Garcia said. “I would anticipate that there will be more outbound examinations if we're getting the data prior to departure.”

Garcia said CBP has learned valuable lessons from the pilots, including that the agency is “lacking a lot of [export] data that has been provided to us.” He also said, once EEM is mandated, industry shouldn’t expect other agencies to immediately be involved in targeting export shipments.

“A lot of the agencies, I don't think they're on board yet because they can't see it. It's not tangible to them yet,” Garcia said. “It's not going to be similar, at least in the onset, to imports, where you have FDA, where you have USDA, where you have agricultural inspectors at the ports of entry, side by side with the CBP officers.” Garcia said outbound targeting will fall “strictly to CBP officers and its National Targeting Center “at the onset, and I would say for a while.”

He also noted that most ports “don't have a large outbound presence.” When Garcia visits land border airports and asks about their outbound infrastructure, he said the response he often gets is: “Huh?”

This initial set of EEM mandates won’t cover the truck transportation mode, which is on a different timeline as CBP tries to develop a truck manifest that aligns with Mexico and Canada. The U.S. has had a “little bit of difficulty in getting our counterparts to the table” for those conversations, David Corn, a member of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee, said during the conference.

Corn said the COAC is working “through some different channels” to try to reach them, because that will “propel truck forward into the same place as we have now for rail, air and ocean.” But “that's harder to say than you realize.”