Mandatory electronic export filing moves closer to reality

Mandatory electronic export filing moves closer to reality    The U.S. Census Bureau is optimistic it can begin requiring shippers to electronically file all export data with the government by Jan. 1, 2005, said Jerome Greenwell, chief of regulations for the Foreign Trade Division.
   Congress mandated in 2002 that all shippers export declarations (SED) be filed through the Automated Export System or its online cousin, AES Direct.
   Greenwell, addressing the National Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Association of America conference in Orlando, Fla., said he anticipated a formal notice of the proposed rule will be published in the Federal Register in June and a final rule issued by October, and definitely by the end of the year.
   AES processes 1.1 million transactions per month and another 300,000 through the AES Direct Web portal accounting for 91.5 percent of all export trade data, said AES branch chief Gerard Horner. The remaining 100,000 SEDs that are still filed on paper will have to be fully automated a year from now.
   The error rate is only 0.7 percent on SEDs filed via AES, but data quality plunges 50 percent when paper forms are filled out in part because paper filers do not benefit from automated prompts warning that essential data is missing or incorrect, Horner said.
   At least 92 percent of freight forwarders already file export data for their clients via AES, Greenwell said. In the vessel environment, 97 percent of all transactions are done through AES, Horner said. During the last six months, usage has jumped from 80 percent to 93 percent among air forwarders as more airlines require the external transaction number generated by the shipper and a Customs-generated receipt, or internal transaction number, on their airway bills, he said.
   Most of the trouble lies on the southern border. The Laredo, Texas, port is the most non-automated port in the nation with 23,000 paper SEDs filed each month, said Horner, part of a large Census contingent that makes an annual pilgrimage to educate forwarders at the convention about changes in export data requirements. Other ports, such as Brownsville, Texas; Otay Mesa, Calif.; and Nogales, Ariz., also receive many paper export documents from forwarders.
   Along with the move to paperless filing are new regulations for stricter penalties, with a 10-fold increase in the maximum fine to $10,000 and criminal penalties, as the Census Bureau and U.S. Customs and Border Protection raise the level of export documentation to the same level as import documentation controls. Census is delegating authority to Customs to enforce the foreign trade regulations on its behalf.
   Last year, Customs made about 750 seizures for Census violations, most of them for not filing SEDs, according to Rob Rawls, the Customs' program officer in charge of export enforcement. Of the 1.1 million monthly AES transactions, 4.3 percent are filed late, so filers will have to improve to avoid tougher penalties, Horner warned. However, he said the number of late filers should go down once new formatting changes are incorporated in AES this summer because the current system does not allow forwarders to easily make changes to their entries.