CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:​

CBP’s weekend deployment of drawback, reconciliation and liquidation in ACE was “successful,” though some hurdles remain before systems are running as intended, CBP officials said on a pair of phone calls with trade stakeholders held Feb. 26. The deployment marked a “significant milestone,” being the last of the major scheduled “core” ACE deployments, said Deborah Augustin, executive director of CBP’s Trade Transformation Office. “At this time, all import manifest, cargo release, post-release and export functionality we had scheduled for delivery in 'core' ACE is now available in ACE,” she said.

Drawback filers will likely face a period of at least four to six months under interim procedures once drawback transitions to ACE over the Feb. 24 weekend, Michael Cerny of Sandler Travis said during a Feb. 23 webinar. Though CBP finished talks with the trade community nearly a year ago, proposed regulations drafted by CBP on drawback processes under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 continue to languish in the interagency review process, so filers will begin life in the new framework under a “draft guidance” issued by CBP on Feb. 9 (see 1802120020).

Coming new drawback processes under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (see 1802120020) are the source of "considerable concern," said Steven Baker, a lawyer who chairs the Customs Committee of the American Institute for International Steel, in a blog post. While the drawback processing is set to move to ACE on Feb. 24, "not all functions are supported in ACE, and as of this writing no regulations have been issued," Baker said.

CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:​

Several partner government agencies (PGAs) have now confirmed in writing that they will attach their message sets to e214 electronic Foreign-Trade Zone admissions filings once they are available in ACE, trade associations said in a Feb. 21 letter to CBP. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (for both its core and Lacey Act data sets), the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have all said they will switch from current PGA message set filing at the time of type 06 entry/entry summary filing to at time of admission to the zone once the e214 is deployed, the letter said.

CBP posted its cutover plans for the transition of reconciliation and drawback into ACE over the Feb. 24 weekend, it said in a CSMS message. The agency plans to turn off both in the legacy Automated Commercial System at 8 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 23, and any submissions to ACS after that time will be rejected, it said. The Feb. 24 deployment also includes liquidation, as well as new e-bond and Cuba import filing capabilities (see 1802080023).

CBP plans to issue procedures for ACE outages before the end of the month, the agency said in an Outages Working Group report released ahead of the Feb. 28 Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) meeting in Miami. CBP will "publish the public downtime procedures document by the end of February," it said. Following some COAC recommendations in November, "CBP’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) has assigned a development team to begin working on the recommended enhancements," it said. "Enhancements to the Dashboard will be implemented throughout calendar year 2018."

CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:​

The National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America recently called on CBP to address several holes that still remain in ACE. “While CBP has made great strides over the last few years in development of ACE, we are still in need of additional critical development to make ACE functional,” the trade group said in a white paper. An attached “Priority List” lays out the specific needs of the trade community and where CBP is in addressing them. The group raised similar issues in a Feb. 9 letter to Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner in the CBP Office of Trade, obtained by International Trade Today