Few venues are as important as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to talk about issues of national concern. I want to talk about the challenges facing the Customs Service, some of the solutions we've put in place, and the steps we'll take in the future to make Customs a better, more effective agency.

I arrived at Customs fully aware of the agency's proud and distinguished past. I was also aware of its problems.

Few departments can claim the Customs legacy: founded in 1789, the Nation's oldest law enforcement agency, Customs funded the young American republic and bankrolled its expansion westward and into the Louisiana territories.

For over two hundred years, Customs has served as the guardian of our nation's borders - America's frontline.

Our mission is to enforce the laws of the United States, safeguard the revenue, and foster lawful international trade and travel.

In 1998 alone, we seized over a million pounds of illegal drugs. We processed 955 billion dollars in trade. And we raised 20 billion dollars in revenue for the federal government, second only to the IRS.

These successes, however, cannot guarantee an agency's ability to adapt to changing times.

Success is something you build upon.

Success is something you work at constantly.

Any agency, no matter how proud its past, can develop weaknesses over time. One of my first undertakings upon being confirmed as Commissioner was to develop a priority list of problem areas at Customs.

We used this list to develop something called Action Plan 1999, a succinct yet comprehensive guide to improving the way Customs does business. The plan covers all the major areas that we have to be concerned about, from both a law enforcement and a trade perspective. These areas are integrity, accountability, discipline, training, automation and passenger services.

I want to speak to you about each of these areas, and what we're doing to strengthen them. Daniel Webster, upon whose home foundation the U. S. Chamber was built, once said: "There is nothing so powerful as the truth."

There is a corollary in law enforcement that nothing is so important as integrity. Undermine integrity and you undermine credibility in the organization.

Undermine integrity and you undermine public confidence in law enforcement.

Undermine integrity and you put the lives of law enforcement agents and others at risk.

While instances of corruption in the ranks of the Customs service are very few, the agency's response to the problem has not always been good. Some thought that if we didn't look for the problem, it might just go away. The problem didn't go away, however. It stayed there, and continued to sap the morale of the vast majority of honest, hard-working Customs agents and inspectors.

This is not to say there is systemic corruption or acquiescence to it in Customs. There is not. There was not. But there was a failure to recognize how dangerous the corruption threat was to the agency. There was a failure to apply the resources needed to make the corruption fighting capabilities of the Customs Service second to none.

Now, we have taken aggressive steps to safeguard integrity. More are planned. We replaced the Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Internal Affairs with a career prosecutor and former Assistant United States Attorney.

He previously served as Deputy Chief of the Office of Public Integrity at the justice department. We elevated his authority, so that he reports directly to me --- every day.

We instituted a full review of the staff and the work of the office, and will make reassignments as necessary. In fact, we're reassigning some of the best investigators in the Customs Service to Internal Affairs.

We're also seeking the guidance and opinions of experts outside Customs on ways to improve our internal affairs capabilities. We've asked a highly respected former Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the former Director of the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice, to give us an objective assessment of our corruption-fighting reforms.

Greater accountability across Customs will underpin our efforts in Internal Affairs.

We've set new accountability standards for all managers. In the past, decision-making authority was delegated to 301 ports of entry all across the country. We've changed this by expanding the authorities and responsibilities of the Directors of our Customs Management Centers, regional sites that oversee all the activities of a port.

We've also developed a mandatory self- inspection program. In the past, comprehensive inspections of our ports and agent offices were conducted every 5 to 6 years. Now field managers must provide their own assessments of their operations every six months. Their evaluations, in turn, will be checked and verified by headquarters every eighteen to twenty four months. By paying attention to top-level oversight in our field operations, we will eliminate any ambiguity about who is ultimately responsible for getting the job done.

Disciplining employees for misconduct was another major weakness at Customs. First off, we had to improve the way we reported and responded to wrongdoing in the agency. We replaced a weak, fractured and inconsistent allegation and disciplinary process with a new, integrated system. It's designed to stop integrity and disciplinary problems from falling through the cracks. Now all allegations of misconduct, without exception, must be reported to Internal Affairs and referred for further action. A separate unit within Internal Affairs has been created to handle the most serious cases, so that the appropriate resources can be devoted to them.

There were complaints from employees of inconsistency and unfairness in how misconduct was handled from one region to the next. In response, we established Customs-wide disciplinary review boards to provide consistency and objectivity across the entire agency. We're reminding all personnel that they have a duty to report suspected corruption and could face disciplinary action themselves if they fail to.

I want to add that this attempt at fairness extends to our employee promotion system as well. Customs has been criticized in the past for promoting people who didn't deserve it -- managers would often select friends for better jobs. In other words, "cronyism."

This has changed.

Now, the selection of any supervisor or above must be approved by an Assistant Commissioner at Headquarters.

In addition, all selections for promotion will be thoroughly checked.

Anyone who moves up at Customs will do so on the merits, and not on who they know. Integrity cannot be instilled through accountability and discipline alone.

It must be reinforced through training.

We've created a new Office of Training to bolster training in all respects, both in-service and for new employees. I consider training so important that I've created a new, Assistant Commissioner-level post to head this office.

While Customs places a great priority on its enforcement duties, we also have a critical role to play in trade. Clearly, the fact that I am before this group today reflects the importance of Customs' commercial responsibilities.

In 1993, Congress passed the Customs Modernization Act, which set out to redefine the partnership between Customs and the trade community. The idea was to make trade processing streamlined, paperless, and compatible with a changing business world's needs. The most important tool in achieving this is automation, the systems we use to move goods.

Our current automated system, ACS, is simply not equipped to handle the trade of the future. It's old, outdated, and virtually obsolete. We cannot modernize off the ACS platform. We cannot use it to improve our ability to focus on high risk goods, a critical need in a time of booming global trade. As mandated by the Congress, Customs developed an answer to this problem -- the Automated Commercial Environment, or ACE.

However, the General Accounting Office has been critical of our abilities to proceed on such a major investment. GAO has faulted our cost and design approaches. New automation is so important to the future of the Customs Service, and to U.S. trade, that we don't want to waste time arguing about ownership and who develops the system.

So in response to the GAO findings, we've retained the Mitre Corporation, a federally funded research and development corporation, to develop a request for proposals for a prime contractor for the new system.

Through this prime contractor, we'll partner with the private sector to build the best automated system possible. I'd like to talk now about a very sensitive area for Customs, passenger services. Concerns have been raised that Customs was not properly informing the traveling public about what to expect when entering the United States.

In response to this issue, we commissioned a leading consulting agency to critique our passenger processing operations. That consultant provided many valuable recommendations on how to improve the way we communicate Customs procedures to the public. We're implementing these suggestions right now.

Let me offer a few examples:

We're revising our Customs declaration forms, which all arriving passengers must fill out when they arrive in the U.S. We're displaying better signs in our inspection areas. We've mandated more intensive training for all our new inspection personnel, to include improved communication and intercultural skills. We're providing comment cards to passengers to give us feedback on our services. If they have any complaints or questions, they can also contact a new Customer Service Center that we established at headquarters in Washington.

The most sensitive aspect of passenger services, however, remains the personal search. By this I mean the physical contact that inspectors must sometimes utilize to check travelers who are suspected of carrying drugs.

The personal search, though rare, is a very important tool in combating a growing trend in the number of people carrying drugs either on or in their bodies. One of the things we're doing to make this experience less invasive is to use more technology. Customs has already gone "on-line" with non-intrusive, body-scan technology at 2 of the nation's busiest airports, JFK and Miami.

These devices, similar to x-rays, limit or abolish the need for physical contact during a personal search. However, no amount of technology can protect against racial bias, something Customs has been accused of practicing in its selection of travelers for personal searches.

At Customs, we take these allegations very seriously, and will act immediately to investigate them. In fact, we've already formed and convened an independent commission to review our passenger search procedures.

The Customs Personal Search Review Commission, made up of prominent leaders in race relations and government affairs, will assess our search procedures and make published recommendations to me by July 15th.

There is simply no place for bias, or even the perception of bias, in the U.S. Customs Service. Integrity, accountability, discipline, training, automation, and passenger services. These are the issues, and the challenges, that define Customs today.

We're building a Customs Service that takes action, holds people accountable, and gets results. We're building a Customs Service that is more caring, efficient, and accessible to the trade community and the traveling public than it ever was before. In many respects, it's a Customs Service that would have been unrecognizable ten, even five years ago.

This goes right down to our new uniforms and our new logo, both of which reflect the pride of serving at an agency that plays so vital a role in this nation's drug enforcement and its commerce.

Some have questioned our capacity to meet the challenges ahead. Yet this is not the first time Customs has had to confront a changing world. I believe our ability to weather more than 200 years of change and challenge speaks to our determination today to adapt and to succeed, despite all the obstacles. The nation's oldest law enforcement agency has delivered time and time again for the American people. There is no reason, given the initiatives I have described to you today, it will not do so once more.