Full ACE Export Manifest Functionality Expected to Help Resolve Issues Between Forwarders, Carriers
Full deployment of export manifest capabilities in ACE is expected to automatically connect manifest and export commodity filings, and should help resolve current disputes between freight forwarders and carriers regarding responsibility for filing and correlating those different information sets, government officials said Oct. 3 during a Bureau of Industry and Security export control policy conference. CBP recently expanded pre-departure export manifest filing pilots for exports in ACE to more participants, and extended the testing periods to Aug. 10, 2018, for air cargo, Sept. 21, 2018, for vessel cargo and Oct. 9, 2018, for rail cargo (see 1708110020).
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ACE export manifest requirements for the truck mode are on the “back burner” and will “hopefully” be completed by mid-2018, but there is no Federal Register notice in the pipeline, David Garcia, chief of the Sea and Rail Manifest Branch in CBP’s Trade Transformation Office, said during BIS’s annual update conference. CBP’s Office of Field Operations is still trying to figure out how CBP will establish data elements for Canadian imports and U.S. exports to Mexico, Garcia said.
One forwarder in the audience said that she is hoping the forthcoming rule requiring export manifest filing in ACE will cut down on forwarder penalties resulting from “miscommunication” by the carrier. “That’s kind of what we’re hoping for,” Garcia said. “The carriers are kind of pushing back on who will submit what, meaning they feel that the forwarders’ files should be submitted, doing the connection between the manifest and the commodity filings, and vice versa. It’s an arm-wrestling contest.”
Garcia also floated the possibility of a regulation to require either the forwarder or the carrier party to a shipment to obtain both pieces of information. “I’ve heard for the last fifteen, ten years the nightmares about port of export, in particular, has been driving you all crazy,” BIS Office of Technology Evaluation Director Gerard Horner said to an audience largely composed of export community members. He agreed that future ACE export manifest requirements should help exporting parties get on the same page.
ACE is coded to accept all partner government agency data for exports, Garcia said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re mandatory in filing,” Garcia said of the PGA data. BIS and State Department licenses are the only two PGA message sets mandatory for ACE export filings, he said. Garcia has expressed and will reiterate his desire to CBP to add PGA data to ACE export reports, even as CBP’s reports team carries a very heavy workload, he said. “I will express that again, because I do understand the frustration about not having it.”
There have also been some developments regarding ACE for State Department-licensed exports, according to Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) Chief Information Officer Karen Wrege during the same conference panel. She said she has requested that CBP streamline the license value decrementation function within State’s PGA message set, after some issues were reported associated with temporary imports. “There’s a fairly large use case that is troublesome, where something comes in temporarily to be repaired, and then you have this value of the repair, and you have to put it on as two separate lines ... to decrement correctly,” she said. “And so industry suggested that we have a PGA field where you say exactly what should be decremented, and then CBP could go about the process of actually taking that value … and using that to decrement or increment the license, depending on where it is in the process.” DDTC is also requesting from CBP the ability to send messages to industry through ACE to provide updates on decrementation, Wrege said.