U.S. CUSTOMS PREPARES FOR LAST Y2K HURDLE

U.S. CUSTOMS PREPARES FOR LAST Y2K HURDLE    U.S. Customs is on alert for its last year 2000 hurdle from Feb. 28 to March 1.
   The agency must contend with possible technical glitches because of Leap Year. Customs will provide Treasury with status reports twice a day during this time.
   “The excellent work done over the millennium transition pointed out that Customs was more than prepared, which is why we’re not going to have a full emergency staff,” said Terrence Spellane, manager of the emergency response center at Customs’ Office of Information and Technology in Newington, Va. “We’ll have a skeleton crew and our 24-hour help desk available.”
   Customs successfully withstood the shift to year 2000. The agency reprogrammed more than 6 million lines of code in its 17-year-old Automated Commercial System for Y2K.