CBP to Release Form 5106 Contingencies in Coming Days, Part of Coordinated Effort to Ensure Trade Readiness
CBP will in the coming days be issuing contingency plans and a frequently asked questions document related to its upcoming deployment of its new Form 5106 in ACE, said Randy Mitchell, director-commercial operations, revenue and entry at CBP, in an interview March 11. The transition effort follows CBP’s decision to stick to its March 16 deadline but significantly reduce the length of an outage related to the deployment in response to concerns from the trade community.
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The National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America had relayed those concerns March 8 in a letter to CBP (see 1903080020). CBP “heard those concerns” and “immediately hopped on a call with them,” ensuring the trade group that CBP was “going to do everything we could to make this release as realistic as possible for them,” said John Leonard, CBP executive director-trade policy and programs.
The previously planned two-day transition period lasting from Friday, March 15, through Sunday, March 17, was trimmed to an extended ACE maintenance outage running from 9 p.m. on Saturday evening until 4 a.m. on Sunday. Cargo will move under CBP’s routine ACE outage procedures, and filers will still be able to transmit CBP Form 5106 for new importers, Mitchell said.
Any submissions using the old "Importer Create/Update ABI application after 9 p.m. March 16 will be rejected, said a CBP spokesman after the interview. Any of the new forms submitted using the ACE Importer Create Update will be "held in queue and processed once the entire deployment is completed," the spokesman said. CBP will start processing new 5106 filings at 4 a.m., he said.
In addition to the new FAQ and contingency plans, CBP also agreed to “work with the trade in order to facilitate and guarantee a sooth implementation,” Mitchell said. “Communication is a large part of that,” working to resolve any technical difficulties and implementation questions, he said. Currently, about 90 percent of CBP Form 5106s are transmitted via the Automated Broker Interface, with the rest sent through ACE reports and on paper.
As in any major deployment, “CBP takes particular care to work with the trade community” and help them through “any concerns they have,” Leonard said. “A lot of advance work was done on this particular release,” though the partial federal government shutdown did hamper communications “to a certain degree,” he said. “We’re taking extra care to make sure” the entire trade community ”is in good shape for the release.”