U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued CSMS message #11-000320 to provide the December 2011 Trade Account Owner (TAO) Update. This update features information on (i) Periodic Monthly Statement (PMS) dates for 2012, (ii) an update on the Simplified Entry Test, (iii) instructions for changing the trade account owner, (iv) recent updates for the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), and (v) a wrap up of ACE in 2011.

At the December 7, 2011 COAC meeting, the COAC Subcommittee on One U.S. Government at the Border (1USG@TB) provided an update on its efforts to identify redundancies with CBP and Participating Government Agency requests for documents/data. The Subcommittee has been focusing its efforts on the PGA member agencies of the Border Interagency Executive Committee¹ and has begun a series of phone calls with each of the BIEC’s PGAs in order to discuss issues such as whether there is a need for reliance on paper forms, the viability of leveraging data currently provided to CBP for PGA purposes, how the recognition of an importer’s trusted shipper status by CBP could change the amount/type of data required by a PGA, etc.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted an updated version of its spreadsheet of ACE ESAR A2.2 (Initial Entry Types) programming issues.

Broker Power is providing readers with some of the top stories for December 19-23, 2011 in case they were missed last week.

The Trade Support Network has issued its November 2011 Monthly Committee Report, which states it has updated and resubmitted its request¹ for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to add programming that allows non-ABI filers to generate post summary (pre-liquidation) amendments and corrections using the ACE Portal for entry summary data initially filed and accepted in the ACE Portal.

Government sources have confirmed that as reported in a September 2010 DHS OIG Information Technology Management Letter, routine maintenance of the Automated Commercial System (ACS) is increasingly difficult and expensive for a number of reasons, including its use of the COBAL programming language (a language that was created in 1959 and last revised in 1985).¹ Sources add that a great deal of funding is also being used to sync ACS data with data in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE).

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has announced that 13 CBP ports have started to process rail and sea manifests in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE). The pilots for e-Manifest: Rail and Sea (M1), which began in November 2011, focus on transitioning full rail and sea manifest capability to ACE from the legacy Automated Manifest System of ACS.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is notifying ABI filers that new PGA Manifest Hold functionality is expected to be added to the Cargo Release Entry System (moved to production) in 90 days. This new functionality will accommodate the ACE M1 Multi Modal Manifest (MMM) System for Ocean and Rail.

Broker Power is providing readers with some of the top stories for December 12-16, 2011 in case they were missed last week.

The National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America has issued a White Paper on the need for customs brokers to transition to ACE now, saying "it's necessary, it's desirable, and it's urgent." NCBFAA's Board believes that it is no longer a question of whether to migrate to ACE, but when, and states that it is not feasible to wait for ACE to be finished before attempting to use it, nor is it plausible to rely on it being abandoned. While much work remains to be done, CBP has recently begun to show good progress and has adopted essentially all of the recommendations for functional development outlined in the initial NCBFAA White Papers. It is time for the brokerage industry to support that development and accept the inevitable.