UPDATE - ATA Carnets Exempt from EEI/AES Filing

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the U.S. Census Bureau have verbally confirmed to Cynthia Duncan, Senior Vice President, Carnet & Trade Services, United States Council for International Business (USCIB), that ATA Carnets will be EXEMPT from filing Electronic Export Information (EEI) into the Automated Export System (AES). Until this confirmation Wednesday, ATA Carnet users were to be penalized as of October 2nd, 2014 for failure to file the EEI with most carnet shipments.

Census is working to revise the current rules to reflect the exemption. We will advise you as soon as that revision is published and additional guidance is available. As always, controlled exports will continue to require an EEI filing.

For answers on how to handle carnet shipments and EEI requirements, call the boomerang carnets®, Carnet HelpLine® 800.ATA.2900 or email us.

Until details are released it is unknown on what basis CBP exempted ATA Carnets from the new Foreign Trade Regulations regarding EEI filings. However, boomerang carnets®' Chairman, Bruce A. Wilson, had asserted that ATA Carnets should be excluded since the ATA Carnet convention is an international treaty that would supersede U.S. Foreign Trade Regulations. The USCIB lobbied CBP, Census and the Department of Commerce on this basis, as well as on practical concerns about the effect of the increased, costly and cumbersome regulations that would negatively impact U.S. exports.

Concerns included:

• the increased cost to the carnet user of doing the filing,
• the potential for minimum penalties of $10,000 per violation,
• barriers to export where pages of carnet items would now need to be classified, and
• the impossibility of foreign carnet holders finding a U.S. entity willing to do an EEI filing on their behalf.

We will provide additional analysis when details of the exemption are released.