Census Should Soon Have ‘Better Idea’ on Redundant State of Origin Reporting Requirement

The Census Bureau is hoping to figure out within the next several weeks whether it will eliminate an Automated Export System data element that collects redundant information on an export’s state of origin, a Commerce Department official said last week.

The agency is still “doing ongoing analysis” to determine whether it can make the change, said the official, speaking on background under a policy for certain career personnel at the Bureau of Industry and Security annual conference. “I believe, come April, we should have a better idea.”

The agency in November said it is looking to eliminate one of two fields in AES that are capturing the same information -- the state of origin data element and the address field for the U.S. Principal Party in Interest (see 2310310053 and 2310240069). But the Commerce official said the process hasn’t been a quick fix, partly because Census needs to make sure eliminating one of those fields won’t affect other collected data.

Because the two AES fields should always be the same, Census deployed an AES informational message last year to alert exporters when they don’t match (see 2302070055). It later upgraded the severity of the message to inform filers that their filing likely contains a reporting violation (see 2311090021).

The Commerce official said the agency had to upgrade the message severity because the agency was still seeing “quite a large number of mismatches” between the two fields. “We’re hoping that with the increase in severity, that it might draw a little bit more attention to the fact that this is what we're looking for.”

Deciding whether to eliminate one of the fields is “really going to depend on whether the compliance alert essentially serves its educational purpose,” the official said. The agency should have an update soon and “see, hopefully, more of a positive impact on the filings.”

“It's really going to be dependent on: is this gap eliminated with this compliance alert?” the official said. “And, ultimately, so that our data folks feel comfortable with what it is that we're getting.”

The official also said Census is working on a new “general clarification rule” for its Foreign Trade Regulations, which will remove dead URL links, fix grammatical errors and improve “the consistency” of the language. “This one will really serve as a cleanup rule that we hope to get out soon.”