Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said officials are looking to balance trade enforcement and trade facilitation by incentivizing private-sector partnerships.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is exploring a sort of “known shipper” approach for according trade-processing benefits to e-commerce “partners in compliance” as well as for holding transacting parties accountable for low-value shipment violations, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Tuesday during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Sixth Annual Global Supply Chain Summit.
“We want to explore trade benefit incentives in the e-commerce marketplace, not unlike the voluntary Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism [CTPAT] approach,” he said. “That way, we can focus on noncompliant trade while offering processing benefits to compliant importers. This kind of known shipper program could be a win-win for CBP and stakeholders in the e-commerce arena.”
McAleenan this winter hosted his customs counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom in Seattle, where the officials visited Amazon’s headquarters and talked about the development of the company’s business practices, he said.
CBP needs to continue its dialogue with e-commerce providers including eBay, Alibaba and other major retailers to understand who is participating in the marketplaces, how to ensure participants are legitimate, safeguard e-commerce supply chains from counterfeits and counteract potential exploiters of the e-commerce marketplace, McAleenan said.
The agency is continuing to work with several different groups, including nontraditional partners such as state and local governments, as part of its e-commerce strategy, he said.
“In order to focus on uncovering threats in small parcels, we have to tailor our enforcement tools to better address that specific environment,” McAleenan said. “We’ve done this effectively together before. Back in 2010, we launched the Air Cargo Advance Screening pilot, or ACAS, soon to be a regulated and permanent program. … Today, we’re getting data from 193 countries populating the [ACAS] system, and we’ve received over 525 million bills of lading through that process.”
CBP officials on Monday met with the entire U.S. interagency that has a role in world customs issues before McAleenan is scheduled to go to a World Customs Organization (WCO) Council meeting in June, he said.
The council is expected to adopt an e-commerce package next month, after the WCO released a draft framework of e-commerce standards in December that raised concerns among various parts of the U.S. government.
“A framework is a very serious instrument for the WCO, and they don’t use that term lightly and rarely will issue one,” CBP Trade Policy and Programs Executive Director John Leonard said during the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAA) annual conference earlier this month.
The WCO’s review process prior to release of that document was sudden and ad hoc, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative thought the framework veered too far outside of the customs lane and into aspects of trade policy, trade and financial services, anticompetition issues and data privacy and security issues WCO, he said.
During the Chamber conference Tuesday, Michael Dougherty, assistant secretary for border, immigration and trade policy at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also noted that the draft framework sparked concern.
The WCO Policy Council is set to consider a two-page CBP document of 15 standards at its June meeting, but CBP hopes the WCO will postpone the release of a final e-commerce framework for another year, Leonard said.
CBP recently briefed Democrat staff of the Senate Finance Committee on additional e-commerce-related authorities desired by the agency, after Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked CBP to submit a detailed list of e-commerce enforcement requests by the end of May 4, according to a Democrat committee aide.
Staff expect to have “some follow-up conversations” on the matter, the aide said.
The complement of enhanced e-commerce enforcement authorities CBP is seeking from Congress includes enhanced legal regulatory ability; improved and adapted e-commerce-related field operations; incentivization of increased private sector compliance, including “new actors” such as platforms and marketplaces, to be more compliant; and the ability to lead and facilitate global e-commerce standards, Leonard said during the NCBFAA conference.
CBP didn’t respond to a question of whether the agency had yet submitted a written list of e-commerce requests to Finance.
CBP exploring ‘known shipper’ e-commerce concept
