U.S. Customs Proposes to Mandate Broker Continuing Education – Good Idea or Bad?

U.S. Customs has proposed the creation of regulations that would mandate continuing education for customs brokers that are individual license holders.  It hopes to start putting something in writing before the end of the month and a Final Rule out by 2015.

Elena Ryan, Acting Director of Trade Facilitation and Administration at US Customs, explained this in a “Role of the Broker” webinar last week, for which a follow up event (link below) on June 6th was announced today. 

Does 40 hours of continuing education over 3 years and  reportable on the

soon-to-be electronic tri-ennial report even make sense?  Send your questions

and comments to Elena Ryan at roleofthebroker.cbp.dhs.gov

Customs aspires to find “low cost” providers that will offer classes, in conjunction with those no cost classes offered by Customs itself, so that brokers can take 40, yes F-O-R-T-Y, hours of education over 3 years. 

The logic behind this number was that a broker can do 1 hour a month in continuing education and, as explained by Ms. Ryan, “since the number was close to 40 hours, they just decided to round it up.”

Currently, there are about 15,000 licenses issued and about 9000

 active brokers according to Ms. Ryan.

 The initial idea is to have a small pool of authorized providers, i.e., 5 to 10, that offer “low cost” classes which are accredited by Customs.  (Anything sound weird yet?)

And of course, this creates a new recordkeeping requirement for brokers adding more paper work for brokers to keep track of.  Joy! 

Of course, a failure to present such kept records upon request could result in a Customs penalty, or, yep, you guessed it, having the license revoked.

Ideas for meeting this requirement included attending webinars and in-person training.  Webinars considered acceptable would also be those offered by other government agencies, for which presumably, Customs would get to issue a certificate or other proof that such broker had attended…

Other acceptable formats would include activities such as trade symposia, conferences and association meetings.

Customs has recorded the webinar last week (May 2, 2013) and the link to that is here:

 http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/trade/trade_transformation/broker_role/br_webinars/proposed_framework/  

As for the upcoming webinar, that link can be found here and there is no registration required, you simply click on the link a few minutes before the start time on June 6th to join. http://cbp.gov/xp/cgov/trade/trade_transformation/broker_role/brokerregs.xml

Questions/comments?  Post below or email me at clark.deanna@gmail.com