It continues to be interesting times throughout the country as new proposals for initiatives to insure the safety of Unites States borders are regularly introduced. The current Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Ralph Basham, has been in this position sine June 6 of 2006. Commissioner Basham has a unique background qualifying him for his position as Customs Commissioner. He previously served in three other government agencies, all of which are now part of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Basham held management positions with United States Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, as well as with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, an agency that serves the enforcement training needs of state, local and federal law enforcement communities. It must be perplexing to Commissioner Basham to view the current overlapping of security procedures in place, particularly between the Transportation Safety Administration and Customs and Border Protection. One Agency, with such a large umbrella, should be organized in a way that permits it to collect the same data only once and distribute it to those who must review that data. The necessity of private industry to comply with separate, but overlapping security procedures by the TSA and CBP is daunting in and of itself. When combined with the additional security requirements of the Food and Drug Administration, and now the CPSC, it makes it all the more expensive and difficult to enforce. Either the United States Government must find a way to streamline both the collection and sharing of data relating to imports and exports, or industry must find a business partner which will perform that function for the varied airlines, indirect air carriers, importers and exporters. The industry is now spending millions of dollars to train and employ its own personnel to properly implement these various government agency security regulations and to interact with each of these agencies to insure proper compliance. The failure to follow the rules often leads to significant monetary penalties being assessed. The industry group at JFK Airport will have a unique opportunity to hear Commissioner Basham discuss various topics relating to both security and commercial operations of Customs and Border protection. Mr. Basham will appear at a function sponsored by the JFK Airport Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Association, KAAMCO and the JFK Airport Chamber of Commerce, on January 14, 2008. We expect that the Commissioner will address some of the issues mentioned above, as well as comment on the upcoming security initiatives for air; additional inducements to insure participation in CTPAT; and discuss, as well, how CBP will be part of the overall increase in insuring the "product safety" of imports. An additional issue that perhaps has interest, particularly for those involved in import, is CBP's current reliance upon analyses that are computer generated but have not been fully vetted by Customs personnel. This is particularly important where reliance upon a computer generated "flag" of an import results in a Customs hold or seizure without analysis of the underlying data. Customs, as well as many of us in the business community, may have become too relianct on what our computer tells us to do rather than using that information as only one measure of compliance. |
