Attachment “H”
Minutes of the Meeting of NCBFAA ACE Strategy Task Group with CBP
Beauregard Facility, August 27, 2009
Attendees
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Attachment “H”
Alan Klestadt
Amy Magnus
Bruce Ingalls
Chip Bowen
Chuck Bennett
Cindy Allen
Gary Schreffler
Greg Olsavsky
Jack Jackson
Janet Pence
Jeff Powell
Jerry Leuters
Josephine Baiamonte
Ken Bargteil
Kim Santos
Kim Marsho
Leslie Bianchi
Lou Samenfink
Mike Mitchell
Steve Hilsen
Stuart Schmidt
Susan Maskell
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Attachment “H”
Summary
Ken Bargteil opened the discussion by providing the rationale behind the recommendation white paper submitted by the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAA). This paper is in response to the challenge given to the NCBFAA by Lou Samenfink and Jay Ahearn to provide insight to the agency on how to develop ACE and get the “buy in” from the NCBFAA membership to migrate to ACE. The goal is for ACE to become the system of record and to decommission ACS. It is about critical functionality and what needs to come on line to meet the needs of both the trade industry and CBP.
The NCBFAA began this process through a small group to examine the best path to adopt ACE functionality in a way that would be the most advantageous to the membership within their own business processes. The group first mapped out the CBP process, from “cradle to grave,” from the membership’s perspective. Then the specific elements/functionality was analyzed.
Through the mapping process differences in the broker’s workload vs. CBP workload, were identified. From the broker perspective, it is all one process which is distributed as needed, to different CBP functions. The flow chart reflects a simplified picture of the broker process and the touch points to CBP and broker clients.
The following key points were also noted by the NCBFAA:
· The NCBFAA membership is also represented by carriers
· The release process is directly related to the entry summary
· The query process is not represented in the flow chart
· The core of this process starts with the importer security filing (ISF) which is tied both to the entry summary and release
· This process does not touch on inbond; it is representative only of a traditional entry/entry summary processing for cargo. Based on the particular profile of the NCBFAA member, the broker could be involved before or after what is reflected in the flow chart
· The bond process is not covered; ebond is something the membership has pointed out as being critical to obtaining an integrated cohesive system for adoption into the broker’s business processes
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Attachment “H”
· As more complex other government agency requirements enter this process, it becomes more critical that those requirements are defined so that programming can begin and the flow of trade is not interrupted
Summary of Discussion
Group I: Entry Type 01, 03 and 11:
Q (CBP): Your paper reflects three main categories of groupings; within each grouping you have several bulletized subgroupings. Are those subgroupings also prioritized?
A (NCBFAA): Not necessarily. All the bulletized subgroupings are integrated pieces that must work together. It is temporal within each grouping.
Q (CBP): Do you understand that the priorities are coming up against a lack of funds to build ACE and that we need to figure out what to do with the remaining money and then request additional funding for the functionality we cannot complete?
A (NCBFAA): That is why we are asking you to focus on the first three entry types (i.e., type 01, 11, 03) that are most critical to the trade and use the funds you have to complete processing for those entry types. These first priorities have to be in there to draw in our community.
Q (NCBFAA): We are aware of your limitations but what we don’t know is where you are today. Can you provide us that information?
A (CBP): We are in agreement with the vast majority of this white paper; we are already working on much of that first grouping.
Group I: MMM
Q (CBP): On page 4 you reference being “back on track” with regard to MMM. What do you mean by that?
A (NCBFAA): We need to have the house bill of lading on the manifest regardless of mode.
Q (CBP): We already have this in place for air and ocean, are you saying you want cargo release at the house bill level?
A (NCBFAA): We understand that we can transmit the house bill but not for manifest release level; it is also different for each mode. We need to understand all 4 modes; our impression was that MMM would harmonize all modes of transportation. The house bill is the lowest common denominator for all modes; we want consistency for release across all modes. This is further exacerbated by ISF.
Q (NCBFAA): Our confusion came about after the strategy meeting before the TSN Plenary session. A statement was made that vessel manifest did not carry house bill detail. Our community, which includes carriers, were told that vessel operators didn’t see a need for that. If you are saying that you are already have that information in the manifest and that it is not just being used for targeting, that is a big clarification.
A (CBP): That information is in the system today but there is nothing connecting the sender of the data to the NVO and then to the master. What we are trying to do with M1 is to provide a unique vessel identifier so that every party on that vessel is tied to that number; we will then tie everything to one conveyance header. This does not address your release functionality but it does address the ability to tie all that information together.
Comment (CBP): Several years ago we allowed the NVO to send us the house bill; when we did that our cargo release went down dramatically because our terminal operators had no visibility to that process. You will need buy in from the terminal operators for that to work.
Comment (NCBFAA): Can we analyze whether we can build in a query to provide visibility to the terminal operators? Can we look at other solutions that can be programmed or assumed in the process at this point?
Q (NCBFAA): Can an analogy be drawn between the way things operate in the air freight community where they already have release at the house bill level?
A (CBP): Air does not report equipment numbers but vessel does…This will be a huge impact to one of these industries. There is also a statutory impact to take into consideration. The NVOs don’t want to share that information with carriers- that is why we allow them to transmit differently. The slot charters also issue their own trip numbers. This is as confusing for us as it is you, but we have statutory blocks. There is a big difference between what we would like to have and what we can require. If the information is sent to us by an ABI filer then we can send that information back to you. The question is, where is the resolution when the information is not correct?
Comment (NCBFAA): Since we have to operate in those 4 diff modes we are forced to continue to absorb those impacts to our industry even though it is difficult for us. In this process we all need to be flexible to change, this should not be a deterrent to move the process forward. We now have an opportunity to do that from a regulatory/statutory perspective and to develop the system to support those changes. In our industry we don’t necessarily write code to solve these problems- we assign people within our internal operations to do the work outside of the scope of the processes. We shouldn’t be at the tail end of this process.
Comment (CBP): This discussion requires a forum with carriers adequately represented.
Comment (NCBFAA): There is a “House Release” working group which is making some strides on this issue. Every mode is participating. We were all surprised that there was not a cross level of understanding. We have had 5 calls to level set everyone…we are starting to get there but we need to do more outreach.
Comment (CBP): We need to do some mapping at that level. Our first step is to get everyone in the same environment so we can support all these key identifiers.
Comment (NCBFAA): Somewhere we need to have link with all these numbers used by that differing industries.
Q (NCBFAA): Who do we go to if we wanted to do a flow chart for this process?
A (CBP): We have already done a business process mapping. We need to review whether that chart needs to be scrubbed of sensitive information but once we do that we can share that with information with you.
Group I: Release
Comment (NCBFAA): Another critical issue for us is that we consider release and summary as one process. These two things must be hand in hand for us to go to the brokerage community and ask their adoption of ACE. Another concern for us is who is going to be the ultimate releasing agency under ITDS?
A (CBP): In the beginning, our vision of “single window” was that all information would be submitted by the trade and then the federal government would go in and get the information it needed and tell the trade if the goods were good to go. However, this is not how things are working. We can say that ACS has been doing ITDS for the last 15 years. The systems is taking information and passing it on to FDA, however, the trade still has to wait for FDA to get a release. We understand that you want to move away from that and move forward to a process where ACE would to all this coordination with other agencies before we give you the final “okay” to release.
Comment (NCBFAA): That is not really what we need. What we want is visibility into the communications between each of the agencies so that we know which party has a hold on the goods and then we want a single release. We need to know when cargo can be physically released from CBP custody and can be moved. This includes having information that tells us when other agencies no longer want the goods in their custody.
We are looking for ACE to be the releasing environment. We want to know if/when CBP says we can move the goods and if another agency wants to do any further analysis.
Comment (CBP): We need to start the 10 days process from the date of release so we can collect the duties. CBP wants you to know that it is not us holding the goods and that it is another agency. CBP agrees that we want to tell you when the goods can leave our custody. You will have that visibility with M1 even though all PGAs will not be ready with their automation
Q (NCBFAA): Will that visibility be provided in ABI or AMS?
A (CBP): Both. All those things will be set in a reference table configurable by flags. As the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) come into place, the flags will be set with ample notification to the trade. The trade will get those disposition codes. That goes to each agency’s statutory authority to place a hold. If an agency does not have the statutory authority to place a hold, that agency will have to make that request to CBP.
Q (NCBFAA): Will you be able to deliver release with entry summary under the current funding?
A (CBP): Not under the current funding.
Q (NCBFAA): What about USDA? In today’s environment CBP can do an inspection and release the goods but then after following up with FDA, we get a conditional release. Is there any way to do an “auto hold” for these sensitive commodities?
A (CBP): If FDA were to communicate to us for example, that all meat products cannot be released, we could do that. If however you want an “auto hold,” we would have to build those types of requirements. For this first release however, we will be staying within the existing requirements…we can decide at a later time whether we want to build this additional granularity.
Comment (CBP): We have an estimated 150-175 million dollars left between FY09 and FY10. The Deputy Secretary has asked the leadership to prioritize what we want to do with the remaining money. From our perspective, we want to continue investing in rail manifest- we want to finish that piece. We also want to continue with ADCVD, post- summary corrections and EDI imaging. When we looked at everything else, we decided that cargo release would cost a lot of time and money; it would be too much to complete but we could start. We also decided to start collecting some of the PGA data now but we are really trying to figure out the best investment for the money we have for cargo release. We want you to weigh in on that. Jay Ahearn and the Deputy Secretary want to finish ACE. Jay Ahearn sees the NCBFAA white paper as a way to show the Hill and OMB that we need more money. The path forward is to say we built some of these things but that we need more money for this additional piece (i.e., cargo release). We need to demonstrate the business case and what it is going to cost. We need to attack each piece separately as we need it.