CBP Relaxes Rules for GBI Pilot; CPSC Still Recruiting for E-Filing Pilot
CBP has relaxed the rules for participants in a pilot aimed to see how effective it would be to replace the manufacturer identification code (MID) with a global business identifier (GBI).
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The pilot opened to participants last December, and at that time, said companies would need to get three numbers -- from Dun & Bradstreet, from GS1 and from the Global Legal Identifier Foundation. These numbers would need to cover manufacturers, shippers and sellers (see 2212010046).
At a session at the CBP Trade Facilitation and Cargo Security Summit last week in Boston, Julia Peterson, chief of CBP's quota and agriculture branch, said they are still "in the infancy of this GBI pilot," and that CBP wants more firms to participate. CBP now says a company can choose one of the three sources of a GBI -- and that Dun & Bradstreet can offer one for free, if the company can wait 30 days to get it. Peterson said the agency has gotten a lot of questions from companies about how much it costs to obtain these identifiers, and that there could be a reduced cost "for certain scenarios." She asked people to email gbi@cbp.dhs.gov if they would like to learn about the cost reductions for the GBIs through the evaluative proof of concept.
Also, there is no deadline to join the pilot, she said. "We expect this test to run at least two years. You can join at any time," she said.
She said that ACE still expects participants to enter three identifiers, but it will be reprogrammed to accept one or two or three.
Peterson was speaking at a session on the Border Interagency Executive Council, and the director of the office of import surveillance from the Consumer Product Safety Commission also took the opportunity to speak about his agency's pilot recruiting efforts. The CPSC is doing a second pilot for e-filing its message set. Its original pilot offered up to nine slots, and had eight participants, according to Jim Joholske, the CPSC director of import surveillance.
Currently, if importers are bringing in certain children's products, CPSC asks for a certificate of third-party testing, and brokers either e-mail a PDF, upload a document in ACE's input system, or the CPSC sees the certificate on paper inside the box when it opens it.
Joholske said CPSC hopes to finish recruiting for its "beta" e-filing pilot by the end of April. He said they want to see firms of all sizes, which import via air and sea and land. The pilot will last about six months, and begin in the fall, he said. They began recruiting in June 2022 (see 2206150056).
"We've got sort of a long runway here," Joholske said, referring to the fact that the original notice of rulemaking came out in 2013, and he described the agency as still in the "beginning stages of rulemaking."