FDA to Debut New Filer Review Process for Customs Brokers
The Food and Drug Administration will soon launch a new process for filer reviews, following the completion in April of a two-month pilot involving nine customs brokers, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America said in an emailed update. The new process will replace strict quantitative criteria, whereby a filer with an error rate of over 10 percent failed a review, with a more subjective review that accounts for the magnitude of the error. Several clerical errors won’t necessarily result in a failure, but a single substantive error may cause an “official action” status, the NCBFAA said.
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FDA will also work to make the process more transparent. The review will be limited to a specific number of randomly selected lines, encompassing all entries filed at a port, even if the entry was remotely filed from another location, FDA said, according to the NCBFAA. Aware of past communication issues, an FDA official, Director of the Division of Import Operations John Verbeten, said the reviewer will tell the broker about any problems and discuss them openly, the NCBFAA said.
Rather than resulting in either pass or fail, reviews will result in one of three classification levels: no action indicated, voluntary action indicated, and official action indicated. Routine reviews will occur every four years, and follow-up reviews will be conducted if any issues were found in the routine review to determine if they have been corrected. For cause reviews will be conducted for new filers or for issues discovered by FDA.
In its reviews, FDA will try to differentiate between importer and filer errors, Verbeten said, according to the NCBFAA. “For example, he said, if the product is ‘tomatoes’ and the product code identifies it as ‘potatoes,’ that is likely a filer error. If the product is ‘fresh tomatoes,’ but the product code is for ‘canned tomatoes’ and it is invoiced as canned tomatoes, that is an importer error, since the broker would have had no way of knowing,” the NCBFAA said. FDA will continue to post the results of filer reviews online, the NCBFAA said.