PHILADELPHIA -- The glacial pace of developing electronically submitted export manifests is finally picking up, participants on a CBP export modernization panel said, with Tom Pagano, outbound enforcement policy branch chief, saying "we're really close."
CBP issued a list of companies offering ACE Electronic Export Manifest data processing services. The agency created the list “in response to requests from the export trade community,” CBP said in a March 26 CSMS message. “Inclusions on this list do not constitute any form of an endorsement by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as to the nature, extent, or quality of the services, which may be provided.”
American, Canadian and Mexican customs brokers and freight forwarders are urging Canada to rethink its upcoming deployment of a new customs management system in two months, saying they’re concerned the country’s current approach could significantly disrupt trade.
CBP is hoping to launch a truck electronic export manifest (EEM) portal later this year, the agency said ahead of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee’s March 6 meeting (see 2402150016 and 2402260034). CBP listed the effort as “currently under development” in a government issue paper for COAC’s Export Modernization Working Group released this week, which said a truck portal in the Automated Commercial Environment has a “tentative scheduled deployment of Fall 2024.”
The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee is pushing CBP to roll out its long-awaited electronic export manifest within the next COAC term and make progress on aligning truck manifests with both Canada and Mexico to streamline exports traveling by land.
CBP last week updated the landing page on its website for its ACE Electronic Export Manifest program to include more “background information, potential benefits, and additional resources to help participants join” its EEM pilot, the agency said in an Oct. 19 CSMS message. CBP has been working to better inform industry about the potential benefits of EEM to convince more companies to participate in the pilot ahead of its full launch (see 2209150014 and 2110180038).
CBP later this month will remove the launch button for the Automated Export System from the legacy ACE Portal, the agency said in an Oct. 10 CSMS message. Following this change, effective Oct. 21, users will only be able to launch the AESDirect User Interface from the modernized ACE Portal. The message includes step-by-step instructions for launching AESDirect from the modernized ACE Portal.
Cynthia Allen left FedEx Logistics on Sept. 7, and will be “taking some time off with family and friends to lazily contemplate my next career move,” she said in a post on LinkedIn. Allen, a former member of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) who had previously led CBP’s ACE Business Office, was vice president of regulatory affairs and compliance at the company.
Future outbound notifications in the Automated Commercial Environment for ocean, air, rail and in-bond's may be delayed two hours “for the foreseeable future,” CBP said in an Aug. 10 CSMS message. The agency said it’s “working on a fix to speed these notifications up and another CSMS will be issued when that has been implemented.”
CBP this week deployed a new export manifest-related informational response message in the Automated Commercial Environment’s (ACE) certification environment “for the Ocean House Bill Release,” CBP said in a June 6 CSMS message. New message 610 will appear with the description “Empty Vessel (Departure Message – No bill associated to that vessel),” CBP said. “A date for release to the Production environment will be sent in a future message.”