Government and Industry Should Work Together on Customs Issues, Pfizer Executive Says
Supply chain professionals and trade group executives praised the progress U.S. government agencies have made in balancing trade facilitation and enforcement, and pointed to areas where they could still make progress, during the May 22 Global Supply Chain Summit hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lev Kubiak, who spent 24 years as a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security, now is deputy chief security officer for Pfizer. Kubiak said Pfizer is trying to help CBP and Homeland Security Investigations with the information they collects around the world. U.S. customs officials don't automatically receive seizure notices for actions done in other countries. "There is no institutional mechanism for customs services to share that information with other customs services," he said.
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"We're always asking CBP to put more into the game," he said, but industry has to realize that it needs to do some of its own enforcement work to root out counterfeits, too. "They can't solve all our problems." Pharmaceuticals is a heavily regulated industry with a lot of supply chain challenges, he said. "We spend a ton of time on counterfeit medicines," he said. Last year, $7.3 million worth of counterfeit medicines claiming to be Pfizer-branded medicines were seized around the world -- and Kubiak is sure not all of it was found.
Much of the discussion at the event focused on e-commerce policies. DHS Assistant Secretary Michael Dougherty said he hopes that by the next summit, the World Customs Organization's e-commerce standards will be nearly completed, and that those standards will do "everything it's promised to do." Dougherty, whose portfolio includes the border and trade policy, said that the U.S. government was initially alarmed by a 50-page draft but reassured when it was narrowed down to 15 standards and two pages. It's important that the WCO's standards help identify authorized operators so that governments can protect consumers from counterfeits and substandard medicines, and use dynamic risk management technology to allow immediate release while still keeping out illicit opioid shipments and other illegal imports, he said.
Cynthia Allen, vice president of regulatory affairs and compliance for FedEx who helps CBP develop policy through the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee, said there were some big concerns when CBP increased the de minimis level to $800. There were some contentious work group meetings and "there were a lot of people who felt this was facilitating illicit goods," she said. Allen and others talked about the need to modernize how exports are handled, not just imports. She said, "We have never had an automated export manifest in the United States."
Geoffrey Powell, chairman of the board of the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, said his members would love unified cargo processing to apply to exports, not just imports. Unified cargo processing allows for joint cargo inspections by bordering countries.