CBP Still Ironing Out Benefits for Electronic Manifest, Seen as Necessary for Renewed Post-Departure Filing

Pre-departure manifest won’t in any way replace Electronic Export Information (EEI) filing in AES, but will put responsibility for it where it belongs -- with the U.S. Principal Party in Interest (USPPI) -- instead of putting the burden on the carrier to make sure the information is filed, Swanson said. Implementation of pre-departure filing will have other benefits for exporters, though, beyond the eventual new post-departure filing system.

As things currently stand, CBP often has to hold up an entire container when it only wants to examine a small portion of a consolidated shipment. Taking about three weeks, the process often causes the shipment to miss a sailing or two, and costs the exporter a few thousand dollars, Swanson said. But once CBP is able to get pre-departure manifest information “at the lowest level,” exporters will be able to get responses sooner and ship the pallet separately to the port to get it examined before it's stuffed in a container.

Pre-departure manifest also helps CBP confront a growing volume of export shipments falling below the $2,500 de minimis level for AES export filing. A lot of software, electronics and encryption is export controlled but, if the shipment is small enough not to require EEI, can only be seen by CBP on paper manifests. This can also cause issues for the trade when something has to be held up when CBP gets the paper manifest at the last minute, causing bottlenecks. CBP will get data on these shipments earlier, regardless of value, once electronic pre-departure manifest is up and running.

For now, participation in CBP’s ocean, rail and air export manifest pilots is “very limited” because CBP has “not yet shown a lot of operational pieces to this point,” Swanson said. CBP will be asking carriers to “make an investment,” and even though the pre-departure manifest requirement is required by law under the Trade Act of 2002, the agency needs to provide “some return around those investments,” Swanson said, adding that CBP thinks “it’s an expedited process.”

Truck export manifest is a “more difficult” proposition for CBP, with a lot more carriers involved that are often smaller in size. The export component had been held up while CBP rebuilds its inbound truck system, and now that CBP knows what “the architecture model was going to look like,” it can start preliminary work on building operational pieces for the export side “on the back end,” Swanson said.

The truck mode has also required discussions with Canada and Mexico, Swanson said. CBP wants its export system to be interoperable with those two countries’ import manifest systems to avoid any duplication of data submissions for truck shipments leaving the U.S., he said. CBP has begun preliminary discussions, though there are “legal impediments” on the amount of information CBP can share with other governments. Overall, the “sweet spot” for starting to move forward on the truck mode is “sometime next year, probably.”

Once the export manifest system is complete, that will allow CBP to begin moving forward in earnest with its reworked post-departure EEI filing system in AES. Pre-departure manifest filing is the “only way we can mitigate the risk” of post-departure filing, by ensuring CBP has key information on what’s getting exported for risk targeting purposes, Swanson said. After that, it’s not a problem for EEI quantity and value data required by the Census Bureau for statistical purposes to come later, he said. “For us, piece count or value isn’t that important.”

There has been a “big push” by several large exporters to revive “Option 4,” the former name for the program. These companies -- agricultural exporters, for example -- export the same low-risk product over and over again, but often don't know how much they’re exporting “until it’s done,” Swanson said. “They can tell us, ‘I’m exporting wheat,’” but they can’t tell us how much wheat we’ve got until its loaded on the vessel,” so “they’re doing constant updates on their filing.

“The manifest process will allow them to tell CBP, ‘I’m exporting a boatload of wheat,’ and then on the AES filing, after departure – up to four days later – then they can go ahead” and file the quantity and value data for Census. “It continues to meet the accuracy requirements for Census, while still accommodating the national security pieces,” Swanson said.

What’s clear is that it will all be “dependent on getting export manifest, because that’s the only way we can mitigate the risk of any kind of post-departure filing program,” Swanson said. Having exporters “only file post-departure is a risky proposition, so we’re trying to mitigate that risk to enhance the throughput,” and “create a less burdensome border for those that are legitimate filers” while narrowing “that field to find the bad or lazy operators to try to get them into line, or into the enforcement stream if necessary.”

Once that’s all in place, CBP will begin reviving post-departure filing by taking current Option 4 filers and making them the new post-departure program’s first group. After that, CBP will be looking outside of Option 4 for filers with risk profiles that would be a good fit for post-departure. That will include working with export filers that are currently part of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) but not Option 4. A key to the program will be deciding what kind of vetting CBP does on participants, and how that vetting is maintained over a longer period of time -- almost, but not exactly, like CBP does with its Trusted Trader programs, Swanson said.

As for when all that might begin, Swanson was unable to give a time frame on implementation of export manifest. But CBP is working on a business process document for its pilots that describes CBP’s various “business models.” The agency is trying to get that out “in the next month or two,” Swanson said.