Industry presses Bush for leadership on ITDS
Fifty one companies and organizations — including FedEx Corp., Schneider National, Microsoft, the World Shipping Council, the National Retail Federation and the Toy Industry Association — are urging President Bush to order all 80 or more federal agencies that collect international trade data to begin actively participating in and providing financial support to the International Trade Data System, under development as a single government-wide window for accepting data and disseminating it to appropriate agencies.
“Only with full inter-agency participation can we ensure that our government will not only have a tool to facilitate international trade, but also one that will promote the information and data sharing necessary to ensure the security of our nation’s supply chain against those who seek to do us harm,” the trade automation coalition said in an April 1 letter to Bush, obtained by American Shipper.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is expected to similarly urge the White House to help promote the success of ITDS, Sandra Scott, director of international relations at Yellow Roadway Corp., said during a meeting Friday of a federal advisory group to Customs and Border Protection.
The outreach campaign to promote ITDS and its backbone, Customs’ Automated Commercial Environment, is a reaction to what is seen as slow adoption of the system by other than a core group of agencies, led by Customs, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture. Companies eventually hope to eliminate the need to file redundant forms with multiple agencies and instead enter transaction information in a standardized form through a central portal that sorts and distributes the data to the required agencies.
Customs and Border Protection is serving as the systems developer and coordinate consensus on how the system will work.
Gene Rosengarden, chairman of the multi-agency ITDS board, told the Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations, that the group has targeted 15 agencies, including the Federal Maritime Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Transportation Command to join the ITDS network in 2004. As many as 40 agencies that share data with the Census Bureau could be swept into the system when the Census Bureau comes on board because their requirements are aligned, he said.
Scott said the ITDS coalition hopes to meet with the White House to further discuss ACE and ITDS development. The group will also publish a white paper soon designed to generate support from Congress for ITDS, she added.
The trade community is pushing for a streamlined system of communication with government because so much of the data is redundant across agencies and costly to generate.
The letter cited a 1998 ITDS study that projected ITDS could result in $2.4 billion worth of total filing cost savings by 2005, while saving the government more than $500 million. Supporters also tout the security aspects of the system, which will enable agencies to more quickly analyze cargo data for terrorist risks.