Background

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has added some functionality to its Automated Commercial Environment deployment schedule, delayed the deployment of some other functions, and confirmed the deployment of still others.

ACE functionality, including data reports, can help importers and others boost compliance and duty savings efforts. For more information, please contact attorney Lenny Feldman via email or at (305) 894-1011.

ACE Portal. Fall 2021 remains the anticipated date for modernizing the legacy ACE portal components into a new user interface to include accounts and the supporting applications that remain in portal for entry processing.

APHIS Message Set. Starting March 15 the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service will fully enforce the APHIS core message set in ACE by raising the severity flag from “warning” to “reject.” When this changes, users will be required to submit message set data for regulated products like plants, plant products, animal products, and live dog imports or their entry will reject.

Bill of Lading. The deployment of functionality to release ocean cargo at the lowest shipment level has been delayed from fall 2021 to winter 2022.

Brokers. CBP plans to develop three capabilities in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, including license applications, permit applications, and annual permit user fees. CBP is still awaiting the issuance of final regulations to transition all brokers to a single national permit, which would eliminate multiple district permits and waivers. Proposed regulations were issued June 5.

Collections. Functionality that will provide a consolidated billing period with each user’s deferred tax entries listed, as well as an additional payment option for trade users to pay their consolidated deferred tax bill, remains planned for May 1.

Newly announced for October is an enhancement of bill management workflow, including bill receivable creation, vendor interface for creation, and distribution of bills to importers. This release will also move liquidation bills to ACE and improve the accuracy of importer bills. This deployment will be followed in March 2022 by an enhancement to the debt management workflow and automation of manual processing and reporting.

Craft Beverages. April 6 is now the target for deploying functionality that will facilitate the filing of Craft Beverage Modernization Act claims and include the ability to compute and validate the tax amount, view/edit tax data on entry summaries via the ACE portal, and make data available for data warehouse reporting.

Foreign-Trade Zones. The availability of an expanded zone ID remains on track for April 24.

Forms. Functionality newly planned for deployment in spring 2022 will migrate CBP forms 28, 29, and 4647 from legacy ACE to the new ACE framework to become the successor of the current ACE validation activity module.

FWS Message Set. All filers currently have the option to file in ACE data required by the Fish and Wildlife Service for imports and exports of foreign fish, wildlife, and plants. While the FWS has yet to publish a notice making use of the FWS message set mandatory, it expects this to take effect in June. A specific date will be announced later.

Global Business Identifier. CBP plans to deploy in winter 2022 an enhancement to replace the manufacturing identification code, producing a unique identifier that captures complete shipper/seller and manufacturer information and eliminating duplicate MIDs and multiple companies being assigned the same MID.

Manifests. Fall 2021 remains the anticipated date for phase 2 and 3 enhancements to complete modernization of the ACE truck manifest.

Tuna. CBP has newly announced the June 21 automation of the manual process related to the annual splitting of prorated tuna tariff-rate quota opening moment entries.

USMCA. On March 13 CBP will complete changes to ACE to further align drawback processing with requirements in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Following this deployment a new USMCA indicator will be available for trade users to signal when USMCA is being claimed on a drawback (entry type 47) submission.

Vehicle exports. CBP has pushed back from summer to fall 2021 functionality enabling it to access all information on exported vehicles from one data query in the Automated Export System.

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