Latest ACE Capabilities Affect Split Shipments, Bills of Lading, Bonds, RLF

Excerpt from: Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg Trade | April 06, 2016

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued a notice documenting the following recently deployed Automated Commercial Environment capabilities.

Air Processing – Split Shipments. CBP has deployed capabilities to accept entries where split shipments terminate in multiple ports of entry. Previously, in these scenarios, trade parties would receive an error message when split airway bills involved multiple in-bonds. ACE can now accept in-bonds on split shipments for both “Hold All” and “Incremental Release” split elections. This means that ACE will notify trade partners through release postings for every part of split bills, not just portions.

Bills of Lading. For truck transactions, ACE now rejects truck mode of transport entries submitted with master and house bills and will only accept simple or regular bills for truck MOT. In addition, CBP has deployed the capability to validate the bill type associated with an entry.

For rail transactions, ACE now accepts for house bill reference purposes only within entry transactions. This functionality supports trade parties in their business processes and does not impact release processing.

Release Date Update In-Bond Arrival. Where applicable, ACE will now update existing release dates to in-bond arrival dates(s).

Bond Type 0. ACE now accepts bond type 0 for entry types 11, 23 and 52 and acceptance of bond type 0 for entry types 12, 21 and 22 is planned for future deployment.

Cancellations. Neither CBP nor the trade can cancel an ACE entry if an associated ACE entry summary is on file. Brokers will be informed electronically that an ACE entry summary cancellation must occur before an ACE entry can be cancelled.

Cancellations to entry or entry summary may occur regardless of the PGA message set status. Previously, entries or entry summaries that had a pending or open PGA status (e.g., an FDA prior notice requirement not yet satisfied) could not be canceled.

Remote Location Filing. ACE now accepts standalone RLF flagged cargo release entries not certified from summary. These entries are no longer required to be filed certified from summary.

Secure Data Portal. As of March 28 trade account owners were granted the ability to reset certain inactive account types. Trade account user and proxy trade account owner accounts may have their passwords reset.