Metric Requirement for Both Paper and Electronic Lacey Declarations to be Enforced July 1
Officials from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have confirmed that APHIS will be enforcing its requirement for plant material quantities to be reported on the Lacey Act declaration using standardized metric units (such as kg, m, m2, and m3), for both paper and electronic Lacey Act Amendment declarations.
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This enforcement effort will begin on approximately July 1, 2010.
CBP sources have also confirmed that there will be no programming changes in the Automated Broker Interface (ABI) to support APHIS’ metric only requirement. Electronic declaration filers will have to select metric units among the choices that have been programmed.
After July 1, Non-Metric Declarations Will Have to be Resubmitted on Paper
According to APHIS sources, once enforcement begins on approximately July 1, APHIS will be contacting filers if their Lacey declarations are in non-metric units of measure, and will be asking that the declaration be resubmitted using metric units of measure and quantities. As the programming for electronic declarations does not support resubmissions or corrections, resubmissions for declarations originally submitted electronically must be on paper.
(Note that the programming that supports electronic Lacey declarations is not fully developed. It does not edit the data, but simply collects what is submitted to pass on to APHIS. There is no tariff number match, nor programming for the submission of corrections or amendments. See ITT’s Online Archives or 02/27/09 news, 09022710, for BP summary.
See ITT’s Online Archives or 05/20/10 news, 10052054, for BP summary on APHIS and CBP talks regarding APHIS’ metric requirement.)