CBP provided new online access to the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) secure data portal account owner designation/authorization form. The online fillable form is (here).
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related issues:
CBP added numerous new capabilities to the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) this year, including the ability for sureties to maintain their power of attorney using an ID number, the agency said in its ACE Trade Account Owner (TAO) update for November and December. The TAO includes a list of features added to ACE this year.
CBP Los Angeles/Long Beach is updating its port procedures for the disposition of merchandise refused by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it said in a public bulletin dated Dec. 21. The bulletin also notified the public that the Federal Destruction and Redelivery Team (Team FDR) will process documentation on FDA refused merchandise, it said.
The Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters (I.E. Canada) voiced some concerns for the requirement to make entry for residue as part of CBP's planned pilot program. CBP is in the process of developing a pilot program that would test new requirements for filing entries on residue contained within Instruments of International Traffic (IIT). I.E. Canada filed the comments with CBP ahead of a planned Federal Register notice detailing the pilot.
The U.S. economy “has been marked by slow but steady recovery and some rebalancing since the last Review,” said the World Trade Organization in its trade policy review of the U.S. “Merchandise and services trade figures have rebounded significantly since the 2009 financial crisis and have now reached new peak levels, surpassing previous 2008 peak levels,” it said. While import policy has remained “relatively static” since the last WTO review in 2010, the U.S. has launched several export initiatives, including the National Export Initiative, and Export Control Reform. Preferential trade and Free Trade Agreements account for a large and growing share of U.S. trade, the report said.
The transition from ACS to ACE M1 created a discrepancy with how ACE matches the names of importers and consignees appearing on inward vessel manifests for which confidential treatment for inward vessel shipments was granted, said CBP in CSMS message. That issue has been resolved and CBP has implemented a technical fix to ACE’s name-matching function, the agency said. CBP also recreated the data extracts and made them available to subscribers so that they can update their own sites to remove any confidential information that may have been inadvertently released.
In response to an Office of Management and Budget mandate, CBP is migrating all public facing applications behind a Trusted Internet Gateway (TIC), it said in CSMS message # 12-000565. The ACE application is one of the public facing CBP applications that will be migrating to the TIC, said CBP. Migration of the ACE application will consist of a change in the public IP currently associated with the ACE URL, it said.
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related issues:
International Trade Today is providing readers with some of the top stories for Dec. 3-7 in case they were missed.