4 January 2004

CBP abruptly terminates test of e-manifest

The following article is excerpted from the 4 January 2005 edition of “American Shipper”.

After three weeks of field tests, U.S. Customs and Border Protection pulled the plug Monday [3 January] on a program designed to capture electronic manifest data transmissions from commercial vehicles crossing the border.

In a notice to importers, customs brokers and motor carriers, the CBP office in Blaine, Wash., said it had shut down the electronic truck manifest pilot test that began Dec. 11 to process truck cargo data through the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) computer system currently under construction.

"The expectation is that in the future, after system enhancements, the ACE electronic truck manifest will return to Blaine for a second 'pilot' test," Jay Brandt, assistant port director, said in the notice obtained by Shipper's NewsWire. No reasons for the postponement were given, but several industry sources said the system was plagued with technical problems in the short period it was operating.

"They realized the test was not going quite as well as we had hoped, and for this program to be effective it is going to require a lot more changes and software fixes before customs rolls it out to different ports," said Mark Johnson, president of McClary, Swift & Co. - Blaine Inc. "It was a wise decision on Customs' part to recognize that."….

Blaine was the first border checkpoint to test the ability of motor carriers to automatically transmit truck manifest data and obtain release of their cargo, driver and equipment via the ACE portal or electronic data interchange messaging. In the first week of the test, CBP officers processed 6,279 trucks via the secure ACE portal, according to the December issue of CBP's "Modernization" newsletter.

The truck manifest is supposed to speed up processing at the border by eliminating the use of paper documents and allowing CBP to automatically match up the truck manifest with the customs entry filed by a broker ahead of arrival. But the new system proved so labor intensive that it caused four to five-hour backups during the first few days of testing, according to Johnson and other sources.

Johnson said that to the best of his knowledge there was only one trucking company that had a working Automated Manifest System account. Other trucking companies have applied for program but haven't gone through training to be certified to use the program. That meant Customs personnel at the border were forced to key in the manifest data for the trucks.

Johnson and other customs brokers said the electronic truck manifest actually requires more data elements than there are on a normal customs entry, leading to delays for data entry.

CBP made a big effort to reduce the wait times by cutting back on the some of the data entry when it recognized testing was causing unacceptable delays, he said.

"They didn't have that many carriers signed up (and prepared) for the actual test. They wouldn't be able to tell how effective this would be. If they only had one or two results the test wouldn't be significant," Johnson said. "I think they realized there were a lot of problems that they hadn't anticipated."

Problems have occurred when converting BRASS (an expedited cargo processing program) entry data from the old Automated Commercial System to the new ACE. The process often creates duplicate entry numbers for the same shipment or assigns one entry number to multiple shipments. The system also assigned different release dates than the brokers automated transmission system for cargo being released under the Pre-Arrival Processing System.

Johnson, who also is a board member of the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America and the Northern Border Customs Brokers Association, said he welcomed the postponement because truckers and brokers are still learning to cope with three major changes to customs procedures – advance manifest transmissions, ultimate consignee information and classifying low-value s