U.S. CUSTOMS, CENSUS TO “ATTACK” PAPER SEDS, DATA ERRORS

U.S. CUSTOMS, CENSUS TO “ATTACK” PAPER SEDS, DATA ERRORS

U.S. CUSTOMS, CENSUS TO “ATTACK” PAPER SEDS, DATA ERRORS

   Now that the Automated Export System is up and running, U.S. Customs and the Census Bureau say they’re going to focus more of their attention on paper filings of shipper’s export declarations.
   “There’s going to be a paper attack by Customs and Census,” said Peter J. Baish, director of Customs’ outbound programs at an AES meeting in Washington Wednesday.
   AES was developed several years ago by Customs and Census to automate and improve the collection of export commodity and transportation data. Customs uses the data to target illegal shipments, while Census compiles it for the country’s trade statistics.
   Over 740 companies currently use the system to file their SEDs. Of those companies, 544 are freight forwarders, which represent about 178,000 exporters. Between January and June 2000, over 7 million commodity data lines were processed in AES.
   But the agencies still receive about 500,000 paper SEDs a month, of which half contain errors. Studies also show that exporters spend between $18 and $75 to process these paper SEDs, and three times that amount to correct them. AES promises to significantly reduce the industry’s processing costs and error rates.
   Customs and Census want to place more emphasis on cleaning up lingering errors in both the paper SED and AES environments. One those areas is entering the proper port of exportation (Schedule D codes). “How many vessels have you seen sailing out of Laredo?” said Gerard J. Horner, chief of the Automated Export Systems Branch at Census’ Foreign Trade Division.
   Customs and Census would also like to see more responsibility placed on the exporters and forwarders when it comes to filing their SEDs. Legally, carriers must collect SEDs from shippers and forwarders to prepare and submit their outbound manifests to Customs. However, exporters and forwarders aren’t always cooperative with supplying carriers their SEDs in a timely manner.
   “I don’t think it’s fair to put that type of responsibility on the carriers without giving them any authority,” said C. Harvey Monk, Jr., chief of Census’ Foreign Trade Division.