CBP is extending until April 14 its deadline for customs brokers to submit lists of all current employees in the ACE portal, the agency said in a CSMS message. The deadline was previously Feb. 17. The extension will “give brokers additional time to comply with the requirements and allow for implementation of technical fixes in ACE,” CBP said. Brokers are required to report all current employees, including those not engaged in customs business, to CBP under the recent customs modernization final rule.
CBP will give customs brokers nearly two more months to comply with a new requirement to submit lists of all current employees to CBP via the ACE Portal, the agency said in a CSMS message. Brokers will now have until April 14 to comply with the requirement from the recent customs broker modernization final rule (see 2210170071). The deadline had previously been Feb. 17 (see 2212190056).
Correction: The deadline for brokers to have a complete list of current employees on file with CBP is Feb. 17 (see 2301260059).
CBP deployed new capabilities for updating customs broker employee lists to its modernized ACE Portal on Feb. 2, CBP said in a CSMS message. New functionalities include an individual licensed broker indicator for broker employees, as well as the capability to “bulk upload” up to 200 employees at a time, instead of the previous 50. A “pending” status will be displayed to show the bulk upload is in progress. A new column on the broker employee list will now display an employee end date, and the portal will now check for duplicate Social Security numbers when creating an employee record, preventing the creation of new records with duplicate SSNs, CBP said. Brokers are now required to report all employees by Feb. 17 (see 2212190056).
A field will be available in the ACE Automated Broker Interface for customs brokers and other filers to transmit the Chinese postal code once the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Region Alert postal code requirement takes effect March 18, CBP’s Katie Woodson said during the agency’s bi-weekly ACE call. For China-origin entries after March 18, where the Chinese manufacturer ID is transmitted but the name and address of the manufacturer does not include the postal code, brokers and filers “will have the ability to input [that] information, and they can then input the postal code field that's missing,” Woodson said.
The Commerce Department properly found that Australian steel maker BlueScope Steel did not reimburse its affiliated U.S. importer, BlueScope Steel Americas, for antidumping duties, the U.S. argued in a Jan. 27 reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The government said that claims from AD petitioner U.S. Steel "are based entirely on a misreading of the supply agreement," since the agreement actually sets the price the importer will charge Steelscape, the affiliated final customer, and is silent as to the transfer price between the exporter and importer (U.S. Steel Corp. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 22-2078).
Despite concerns from customs brokers that new provisions in CBP’s recent Part 111 final rule could hurt their client relationships, a new reporting requirement for termination of the broker-client relationship should rarely come up, and another provision on record-keeping by brokers when they discover client compliance issues carries with it some silver linings, customs experts said on a Jan. 25 webinar.
RediBag seeks an order compelling AT&T to produce emails relevant to a lawsuit it’s pursuing against a former sales broker for misappropriating RediBag’s trade secrets, said its motion Friday (docket 1:23-mc-00028) in U.S. District Court for Delaware. RediBag, which supplies plastic and paper bags to supermarkets, learned through discovery that the former broker, John Maierhoffer, communicated with RediBag’s competitors through his AT&T-owned BellSouth email address, said the motion. RediBag subpoenaed AT&T Dec. 9 for copies of Maierhoffer’s emails, including those he admitted to deleting, plus the metadata of those emails, it said: “RediBag wants to see the content of the emails and to determine when they were deleted (including whether they were deleted when Maierhoffer knew or should have known that litigation was underway or imminent).” RediBag’s motion alleges AT&T is dragging its feet on the subpoena, citing the referral of one AT&T representative to Yahoo as the company that’s in possession of the missing emails. An internet search reveals that Yahoo “is under contract with AT&T to provide certain services to AT&T customers with various types of email addresses,” including BellSouth email addresses, it said. “In an abundance of caution, RediBag also has subpoenaed Yahoo, which has not yet responded,” it said. “In other words, publicly available evidence suggests that AT&T has the practical ability to obtain the requested documents.” Several websites visited by RediBag attorneys as recently as Friday show “a relationship between Yahoo and AT&T that almost certainly provides AT&T with the practical ability to obtain the emails of users” with BellSouth email addresses, including Maierhoffer’s, it said. AT&T didn’t comment Monday.
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Compliance with a new country of origin (COO) reporting requirement in the Automated Export System would be difficult for smaller and occasional exporters, many of which would likely have to develop new processes to report that information, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America told the Census Bureau. The NCBFAA urged Census to research whether it can collect that COO information from other sources before it decides to move forward with the proposal.