CBP ‘About Ready’ to Mandate EEM, Swanson Says
CBP is almost ready to mandate electronic export manifest for ocean, air and rail, and plans to issue an EEM pilot for trucks within the next year, said Jim Swanson, director of the cargo and security controls division, for cargo and conveyance security in the CBP Office of Field Operations. CBP has been under pressure to move faster on the project after delays in 2021 pushed back its full release to at least this year (see 2110180038).
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“We're about ready to mandate” it, Swanson said during the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America conference last week. The agency is also “working on truck, and we hope to have a pilot out in the next year or so.” CBP in April renewed both of its electronic export manifest pilots for rail and vessel cargo (see 2204260042), which has been viewed as the precursor to the release of the full mandate.
Swanson said mandated EEM can help the agency because there is a “significant amount of exports that we don't see” because there is no electronic filing with the agency. He specifically pointed to e-commerce shipments, which are “flying out of the country” at a much higher rate than imports are coming in.
“It’s not even close to what we're seeing on the import side, which by the way is about a billion packages a year right now,” Swanson said. Those are all exports that “are not getting reported, and we’re simply taking statistical data that may or may not be correct.”
The new export working group for CBP’s Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee hopes to help the agency make progress on launching EEM, calling it one of the “primary areas of focus” (see 2203310055).
“It's about physical data, but it's also about compliance data," Swanson said. The agency wants "to get importers and exporters more compliant and to find the appropriate bandwidth to identify all of the data, and be able to collect it from the right parties at the right time and put it to the right purpose on the back end."
He also said the agency is very busy monitoring exports that violate Russian sanctions or export controls. Much of that work has included providing guidance to officers about which items may or may not be captured.
“I’m hip-deep in Russia sanctions,” Swanson said. “Quite frankly, we're trying to distill down some very complex regulations and rules down into something that we can make digestible to people who are not certified export specialists.”
Swanson specifically pointed to restrictions on luxury goods, which became subject to Russia and Belarus export controls in March and affect shipments of high-end watches, luxury vehicles, high-end apparel, high-end alcohol, jewelry and other products purchased by Russian elites (see 2203110056).
“If we just say a luxury good, our officers will look at us and go, ‘what do you mean a luxury good?’” he said. “You look at some of the things you would think were a luxury good [but they] weren’t.” Swanson said some controls are focused on restricting exports that “have the most impact on the Russian economy.”