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:
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
