December 18, 2006
 

 

This article is excerpted from the 18 December 2006 edition of “American Shipper”.
 

U.S. importers may have lost a couple of extra weeks to comply with massive changes to the tariff code that governs international trade when the Bush administration late last week  recalculated the timeline that triggers when the code goes into effect.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said Friday they expect to begin enforcing the new tariff around mid-February.

The trade community has been gripped by uncertainty about when the U.S. government will approve the World Customs Organization’s updated Harmonized Tariff Schedule, which significantly changes for 2007 about two-thirds of the commodity categories used to determine tariff rates.

The WCO tariff code changes are supposed to go into effect around the world on Jan. 1, but the United States will miss the deadline because the International Trade Commission was late in adding U.S. suffixes to the WCO’s six-digit code. The administration notified the Congress late in the last session about the U.S. code changes, starting the clock for Congress to review and approve the U.S. refinements to the code within 60 legislative not calendar days.

Businesses were concerned that they might only have two or three days to reclassify their products and update their trade databases to properly enter their goods into the United States….

CBP, the agency responsible for collecting duties, earlier last week projected that the HTS changes would go into effect sometime between Feb. 10 and Feb. 25, but is now projecting that the rules will go into effect around Feb. 1, Daniel Baldwin, assistant commissioner in charge of international trade, told hundreds of trade practitioners at the annual CBP Trade Symposium in Washington.

In response to industry pleas for a minimum of 45 days to implement the tariff update, CBP is granting an additional 15 grace period on top of the 30-day layover before it will begin requiring the new tariffs on customs entries, said Angela Downey, director of summary and account management….

Downey said CBP expects to update the software in the Automated Broker Interface with the 2007 tariff changes in time for the implementation date so that no manual, paper entries will need to be filed.

She said the grace period will apply to both the U.S. and WCO tariff amendments, meaning that CBP will begin enforcing both U.S.-centric and WCO tariff amendments at the same time rather than in staggered fashion to simplify compliance and management of the process….

CBP will put out instructions to its field offices and industry once the final effective dates are
known, Downey said.