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 The Automated Commercial Environment: Modernizing the Trade Process
(12/04/2008)U.S. Customs and Border Protection unveiled their trade strategy at the fifth annual Trade Symposium held Oct. 29-31 in Washington, D.C. The strategy defines how the agency will achieve its mission of facilitating legitimate trade while securing our nation’s borders. One goal is to accelerate the modernization of CBP’s trade process in order to meet the challenges of trade in the 21st century. The Automated Commercial Environment is moving toward this goal. As the agency continues to modernize trade processes and shift towards an account-based approach to business, ACE, in the words of CBP Office of Information and Technology Assistant Commissioner Charles Armstrong, is poised to become “the flagship of the future.”ACE modernizes commercial trade processing systems with features designed to consolidate and automate border processing while providing a centralized online access point to connect CBP and the trade community. With the Automated Targeting System, ACE serves as the foundation of CBP risk assessment capabilities. ACE interfaces with and consolidates information from ATS, Traveler Enforcement Compliance System/National Crime Information Center, Free and Secure Trade and the Automated Commercial System, via the ACE Secure Data Portal.ACE is one of the largest information technology programs in the government today. Its single-window filing will allow the trade community to submit data required by all federal agencies for the clearance of cargo in one place. ACE’s inter-agency data sharing will disseminate international trade and transportation data to all Federal agencies involved in import, export and transportation-related decision making.The ACE portal currently has more than 15,000 trade user accounts and enables users to proactively check for unauthorized filers and monitor compliance data not available through ACS. Access to ACE has helped other government agencies carry out their missions. For example, through the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s ACE portal access, the amount of ineligible meat, poultry and egg products that FSIS detected, detained and removed from commerce and the food chain increased 44-fold during Fiscal Year 2006 from 36,000 to 1.6 million pounds. This trend is continuing; FSIS controlled 2.04 million pounds of ineligible product in FY 2007 and 3 million pounds of ineligible product in the first eight months of FY 2008.Over the next four years, ACE will expand to provide cargo processing capabilities across rail, sea and air and will replace the existing legacy manifest systems in use today. Future releases will result in further automation of entry summary processing and enhanced account management features.As development continues and new capabilities are made available, ACE will become an integral part of the agency’s execution of the trade facilitation and border security strategies set forth at the Trade Symposium. Despite expected challenges to an IT project of this size, CBP is moving forward with plans to deploy rail and sea manifest processing in 2009, followed shortly thereafter by the deployment of capabilities that will set the stage for fully automated entry summary processing in ACE. |
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