Electronic filing of the Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) admission (e214) transactions and the creation of manufacturer identifications within the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system will become mandatory on Dec. 9.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will roll out the next deliverable of post-release capabilities in its new umbrella system on Dec. 9, but will delay the portion focused on statement filing in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) until Jan. 6, 2018.
CBP officials said delaying the statement filings would give importers and customs brokers the opportunity to test with new ACE statement reports.
On Dec. 9, ACE will become mandatory for the Foreign Trade Zone admission (e214) transactions that are filed electronically. In addition, filers will create manufacturer identifications in ACE.
However, from Dec. 9 to Jan. 6, both the new ACE Statement reports (REV-101, REV-102, REV-103 and REV-104) and the legacy ACE Account Revenue reports will be available to the industry for validation and testing purposes. After Jan. 6, ACE will become the system of record for all statements, with the exception of reconciliation statements, CBP said.
By no later than Jan. 13, the agency will fully deploy ACE Statement reports with ACE statement data, while the ACE Account Revenue reports will no longer be available.
On Feb. 24, CBP plans to release the final ACE post-release capabilities, including reconciliation, ACE core drawback and Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (TFTEA) drawback, liquidation and Automated Surety Interface (ASI).
The ACE post-release phase of implementation has experienced its share of delays during the past two years. The agency had set a release date of July 8, 2017, but a week before the deployment decided to hold off due to its desire to conduct more testing.
On Sept. 16, it delivered non-ABI entry summary/lineless (for CBP only), duty deferral and Importer Security Filing capabilities in ACE. Hearing concerns about the lack of readiness from the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones to file the e214, the agency agreed to place it within the Dec. 9 release.
Peter Powell, president of the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAA), said his organization has appreciated CBP’s willingness to delay ACE post-release capabilities, when necessary, until the industry was ready.
During a press conference at the CBP East Coast Trade Symposium in Atlanta on Tuesday, Acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said he wasn’t concerned about overloading the final deployment of ACE post-release capabilities on Feb. 24.
“In actuality, we have had much larger and more complex deployments earlier in the rollout of the different ACE functionality,” he told American Shipper. “These are important final pieces on the post-entry side that we need to complete, but we want to do it when we’re ready and the trade is ready. That’s our key touchstone. We think it will work smoothly.”
“One of the things that we’ve really learned over the course of time, and especially the last couple of years with ACE, is that doing ‘big bang’ doesn’t work for us,” added Brenda Smith, CBP’s executive assistant commissioner for the Office of Trade. “There was a lot of concern about statements not only because they’re related to money but they have such a broad impact. So what we saw was another opportunity to test more fully…I think one of the reasons that we have been relatively successful is that we have taken small bites at the apple and thoroughly tested.
“It’s a lot to do in essentially 60 to 90 days, but we think the trade is essentially ready,” she said. “A lot of the software for the Feb. 24 deployment has been in the certification environment for over a year and so we believe that people are well set up to do it.”
CBP’s next ACE post-release deliverable set for Dec. 9
