During the November 16, 2007 meeting of the Departmental Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Related Homeland Security Functions (COAC), members of COAC agreed on a letter which will be sent to CBP Commissioner Basham regarding CBP's Office of International Trade (OT) and its impact on trade one year after it was formed.
Automated Commercial Environment (ACE)
The Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) is the CBP's electronic system through which the international trade community reports imports and exports and the government determines admissibility.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued its weekly tariff rate quota and tariff preference level commodity report as of November 19, 2007. This report includes TRQs on various products such as beef, sugar, dairy products, peanuts, cotton, cocoa products, tobacco, certain BFTA, DR-CAFTA, Israel FTA, JFTA, MFTA, SFTA, UAFTA (AFTA) and UCFTA (Chile FTA) non-textile TRQs, etc. Each report also includes the AGOA, ATPDEA, BFTA, DR-CAFTA, CBTPA, Haitian HOPE, MFTA, NAFTA, SFTA, and UCFTA TPLs and TRQs for qualifying apparel and/or other textile articles, the TRQs on worsted wool fabrics, etc. (CBP's weekly TRQ/TPL commodity report, dated 11/19/07, available at http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/import/textiles_and_quotas/commodity/)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted to its Web site a notice providing details on the Automated Commercial Environment account type for service providers that was created with the deployment Entry Summary, Accounts, and Revenue (ESAR) A1.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted to its Web site presentations for sessions that will be held during the upcoming Automated Commercial Environment Exchange VIII conference scheduled for November 27-29, 2007 in San Francisco, CA.
The following were posted to CBP's Web site:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued an ABI administrative message stating that some preliminary periodic monthly statements were erroneously sent out of ACE on November 11, 2007 - these should be ignored. They should not have been sent until Friday, November 16, 2007. Some debit authorizations are now being rejected, and CBP is in the process of making ACS corrections to allow debit authorizations to process successfully. Rejected debit authorizations need to be retransmitted once the fix is completed in ACS, which was expected to occur no later that close of business on November 13, 2007. (Adm: 07-0253, dated 11/03/07, available at http://www.brokerpower.com/cgi-bin/adminsearch/admmsg.view.pl?article=2007/2007-0253.ADM.)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued a notice announcing that the seventh group of land border ports to become mandatory for the Automated Commercial Environment electronic manifest: Truck for advance cargo information purposes will be those in Alaska (Alcan, Dalton Cache, and Skagway) effective February 11, 2008.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued an ABI administrative message regarding problems with the processing of ABI application identifier TI/TR (CBP Form 5106 add/update) transactions since the deployment of Entry Summary, Accounts, and Revenue (ESAR) A1.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued an ABI administrative message announcing corrections to Amendment 17, dated June 2007, of the Customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements (CATAIR) document.
On November 6, 2007, the Interagency Working Group on Import Safety presented to President Bush its "Action Plan for Import Safety: A roadmap for continual improvement." The Action Plan includes short and long-term recommendations based on risk-based approaches across the entire import life cycle and a verification model that allocates resources based on risk.