Census Working on Puerto Rico Export Pilot; No Movement on Routed Export Rule, Official Says
The Census Bureau is considering a new pilot program that could test the elimination of some export reporting requirements for shipments to Puerto Rico, said Omari Wooden, Census’ assistant division chief for trade outreach and regulations. Officials have so far crafted two proposals that are being discussed “internally,” Wooden said, and would first seek public comment before implementing a potential pilot.
The announcement comes a few months after the agency decided not to eliminate Electronic Export Information reporting requirements for shipments to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, saying it couldn’t find an alternative data source to replace the information that would no longer have been submitted by exporters (see 2202030016). But Census said it remained open to eliminating the EEI requirements in the future if it found alternative data sources.
Agency officials are now discussing the “possible piloting of different reporting options” between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, Wooden said during a June 14 Regulations and Procedures Technical Advisory Committee meeting. “We're sharing different proposals, we're going through the process of determining how these possible pilots would impact processing, editing, internal flagging, internal processing.”
Officials plan to share two proposals with Nick Orsini, Census’ associate director of economic programs, before moving forward, Wooden said. Then they hope to get feedback from the trade community and other government agencies. “We will need to get buy-in from other agencies that also have visibility to this data,” Wooden said. “Those are some of the things that we're considering.”
Census is also still thinking through its December proposal to add a new country of origin data element in the Automated Export System to help the U.S. better collect foreign trade statistics (see 2112140033), Wooden said. If the rule is adopted, U.S. exporters of foreign-produced goods would be required to declare the country of origin for their item through a “conditional” data element in AES.
The proposal was met mostly with pushback from industry, which said the requirement would place too heavy a financial and administrative burden on exporters (see 2203160026 and 2201040044). Still, Wooden said there is a “statistical need” for the data.
“If it were to proceed, of course it will require programming changes and things to be implemented,” Wooden said. “So no movement on that as of yet, as we're still continuing to discuss that internally, even with our legal department.”
He also said the Commerce Department is still working on its long-awaited routed export rule and doesn’t have a timetable for completion. The rule, which has faced several delays, is expected to include major changes to the process around assigning filing responsibilities to forwarders and address information sharing among parties in routed export transactions (see 2006020049 and 2012080046).
The rule still requires work with Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security and has been on hold partly to give BIS time to swear in Senate-confirmed political leadership (see 2203160018). “One of the things that BIS wanted to do was to make sure that their leadership had an opportunity to weigh in,” Wooden said. But even though BIS has a confirmed undersecretary, assistant secretary for export administration and assistant secretary for export enforcement, the agency has been swamped with Russia-related export control work.
“With Russia being such a priority for everything that they've got going on, [the routed export rule has] been something that's been sort of put to the side. But it's certainly something that BIS is going to be following up with us on,” Wooden said. “So unfortunately, no specific movement on that rule.”