Background

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recently deployed new functionality to the Automated Commercial Environment and has plans for additional deployments over the next few years.

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.

Bill of Lading. The deployment of functionality to release ocean cargo at the lowest shipment level is still planned for 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, 2020.

Collections. Functionality consolidating importers’ deferred tax statements and grouping entries onto one statement was deployed May 1. This release also provides additional electronic payment methods for trade users via the Automated Broker Interface, includes the ability to view deferred tax bills in ACE reports, and gives importers easier access and more time to pay bills.

Still planned 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.

Foreign-Trade Zones. An expanded zone ID became available April 24. This change includes the entry summary create/update transaction accepting an expanded nine-character FTZ ID format. The five- and seven-character formats are still supported until further notice.

Forms. Functionality still 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. However, the FWS is still in the process of formulating regulations requiring the utilization of ACE to submit import data for FWS-regulated commodities and therefore does not have an expected date for enforcement of mandatory submission in ACE.

Global Business Identifier. 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, is still planned for winter 2022.

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

Tuna. CBP remains on schedule to deploy June 21 the automation of the manual process related to the annual splitting of prorated tuna tariff-rate quota opening moment entries.

Vehicle exports. Fall 2021 remains the anticipated timeline for deploying functionality enabling CBP to access all information on exported vehicles from one data query in the Automated Export System.

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