During two recent NCBFAA1 events, Food and Drug Administration officials gave updates on the pilot involving the Import Trade Auxiliary Communication System (ITACS), which ended on August 22 and included a limited number of filers from the Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle Districts.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted a Great Idea Form (GIF) entitled "ACT-840-Revision to Cargo Entry Reports for Simplified Process," which was submitted to CBP for review on October 4, 2011. The GIF suggests modifying certain ACE reports for a Simplified Entry process, as well as creating a new report that just includes Simplified Entries.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued CSMS #11-000246, dated October 12, 2011, which is directed toward all non-ESAR (Entry Summary, Accounts and Revenue) ACE report users. According to CBP, ACE Reports will not be updated until 4 pm Eastern time on October 12.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued CSMS #11-000247 at 5:30 p.m. eastern time on October 12, 2011 to announce an emergency ACS Production outage that could impact ACE Production, that was expected to last about 3 hours. CBP then issued CSMS #11-000248 at 7 p.m. that stated the ACS Production system was again available, and that all messages transmitted during the outage had been held in the queue and were processed. The agency added that there was some impact to ACE functionality.
Speaking on behalf of the NCBFAA ACE Strategy Task Group, NCBFAA President Jeffrey Coppersmith stated his strong belief that it is no longer a question of whether to migrate to the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), but when, and that when is now. Regardless of emotions concerning the pace of development, it isn’t feasible to wait for ACE to be finished before attempting to use it nor is it rational to continue to believe that it will be abandoned. While much work remains to be done, he stated that CBP has recently begun to show good progress and has adopted essentially all of the recommendations for functional development outlined in the NCBFAA White Papers. It is time for the brokerage industry to support that development.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted contact information for its headquarter press officers for national issues and Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted an updated version of its spreadsheet of ACE ESAR A2.2 (Initial Entry Types) programming issues.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted the following ACE User Guides:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted the presentations used at the September 22-23, 2011 Trade Support Network meeting. The postings include presentations given by CBP, APHIS, FDA, FSIS, USCG and the TSN Trade Leadership Council (TLC). The 11 presentations are available here.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued a press release on the October 4, 2011 COAC meeting held in El Paso, Texas. CBP Deputy Commissioner David V. Aguilar opened the meeting and co-chaired it with Tim Skud, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury.