"Our AES Team and their counterparts at the Census Bureau worked extremely hard to reshape what was a very outdated reporting system," said former Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. "By enabling exporters to file electronically, AES has helped U.S. business become more competitive in today's e-commerce economy."

The SED documentation is important for the publication of the trade balance statistics each month and for export control purposes. The government uses the balance of trade statistics for trade policy decisions, while the public uses these same statistics for investment and other business decisions. The trade balance figures are a key measure of how the United States is competing in the world economy. SEDs are also used to control the export of critical technologies, weapons of mass destruction, and precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of illegal drugs. The health and safety of every U.S. citizen relies upon the complete and accurate filing of SEDs by the thousands of exporters, forwarders, and transportation carriers.

Since 1790, Customs has collected ship manifests to gather information on the products being exported from the United States. In 1820, the SED was devised to improve upon the quality and details of the information collected. For the next 175 years, the only way the exporting community could report their exports was to hand these documents over to Customs.

AES was first implemented in 1995 and is now the only U.S. automated system for reporting export data. As of December 2000, over 3,600 unique filers, representing more than 288,000 exporting companies, were using AES. This figure totals 69.5 percent of all export transactions, excluding Canadian data.

AES features edit and warning messages, which assist exporters and carriers in their efforts to comply with export regulations. Additionally, the error rate for AES shipments is less than 3 percent, versus 50 percent for paper SEDs. AES also allows Customs to make data-driven decisions for targeting controlled or illegally exported materials such as weapons of mass destruction and illegal currency, and for selecting shipments for inspection. Planned enhancements such as the collection of Non Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC) data and air transportation data, will provide Customs with additional compliance related information.

According to C. Harvey Monk Jr., Chief of the Foreign Trade Division at the Census Bureau, "The AES helps both the Census Bureau and the Customs Service fulfill their missions, and helps America grow by facilitating the export process."

In the future, AES will be able to interface with other systems, which will speed up the process, enhancing the global movement of cargo. While AES utilizes several Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats, the AES Team is developing alternative methods of communication using the latest information technology.

In October 1999, the Census Bureau implemented AESDirect, a free Internet application for filing commodity information to AES. For more information on AES or AESDirect, please visit AES on CBP.gov or call the AES' toll-free Answerline at 1-800-549-0595.

AES team receives Hammer Award The Automated Export System (AES) was developed by a multi-disciplinary team composed of 124 members from Customs Office of Field Operations, Outbound Programs, and Office of Information and Technology, along with members of the Foreign Trade Division of the Bureau of the Census. On December 21, 2000, the AES Team had the honor of receiving Vice President Al Gore's Hammer Award. The AES group was cited for "reinventing the process of export shipment reporting by replacing paper documents and manual procedures with streamlined procedures, electronic data transmission, and e-commerce. The AES reinvention dramatically simplified the export reporting process. This has resulted in significantly improved U.S. trade statistics for private and public decision making, more effective export control of critical technologies and weapons of mass destruction, and more effective targeting for money laundering and stolen vehicles." Customs has spent untold staff hours and other resources to collect, sort, mail, and store paper Shipper's Export Declarations (SED). The Census Bureau estimates the cost of data entry alone, excluding research and related activities by staff persons, to be $3.7 million in 1999. SED processing cost estimates for the export trade community run to the hundreds of millions of dollars each year. By filing electronically, the exporting community and the U.S. government save valuable time and money. The Hammer Award is presented from the Vice President of the United States to teams of federal employees who have made extraordinary progress in putting customers first, cutting red tape, empowering employees to achieve results Americans care about. The program is part of the Vice President’s National Performance Review. Recipients are presented with a $6 hammer, which is symbolic of the $400 hammer that inspired Vice President Gore to create the award in 1994.

An inside look at AES
The trade community uses the Automated Export System (AES) to facilitate filing of required documentation related to their export transactions. Customs also has many internal users. Inspectors, agents, field analytical staff, research analysts, to name a few, use AES to facilitate their job of enforcing export regulations for various government agencies. AES is a valuable enforcement tool that can identify the high-risk shipments of interest for enforcement reasons. The majority of shipments, which are low risk, then move through our ports quickly and without interference.

In the past year, there have been many new and exciting changes to AES for the internal users.

A new export data query screen offers new, user-friendly ways to view export shipments. The ability to enter local port-specific criteria gives inspectors the discretion they need to meet their individual port's enforcement requirements and to simplify location of shipments when inspections are warranted.

Not so long ago, a State Department paper explained that DSP-5 munitions licenses must be decremented manually and only at the port where the license was originally filed. Today, those licenses are automatically decremented in AES regardless of port of departure as soon as the exporter transmits a commodity transmission with a license requirement. Customs and State are working together on enhancements that provide additional quantity and destination information, as well as the capability to view the entire license on-line, including attachments and provisos.

Performance times have also been dramatically improved in the past year, and more improvements are on the way.

As with any new changes, there will sometimes be growing pains, but the Customs and Census development team continues to add improvements that will benefit all users. With the retirement of the Census' Automated Export Reporting Program (AERP), AES has experienced phenomenal growth in the past year. In November 1999, AES processed only 6 percent of the export trade volume; by the end of 2000, AES handled 64 percent. AES also provides all of this source data to the Automated Targeting System.

Now is the time to take advantage of the capabilities provided by AES! It can be a valuable asset to Customs officers working in the outbound processing area. Internal users can get access to AES with their supervisor's approval. The Customs Office of Information and Technology Training Branch, with help from the Headquarters Outbound Program staff, is developing a curriculum for continued training of field personnel. For more information, an updated User's Guide, and Quick Reference Guide are located on the Customs Infobase.

Special thanks to the Office of Information and Technology staff for contributing to this article.