U.S. CENSUS, CUSTOMS WILL STOP ACCEPTING FAXED SEDS

U.S. CENSUS, CUSTOMS WILL STOP ACCEPTING FAXED SEDS    The U.S. Census Bureau and Customs jointly announced that they will stop accepting faxed copies of shipper's export declarations from exporters and their forwarders by August 4.
   The agencies will require original SEDs to be forwarded to the exporting carrier prior to export.
   “The facsimile copies of the SEDs are illegible because we are receiving copies that have been transmitted several times,” said C. Harvey Monk Jr., chief of Foreign Trade Division at Census and Peter J. Baish, director of outbound processing at Customs, in a recent joint letter to the industry. “As a result, our processing costs have increased because of additional resources required to obtain information for these SEDs.
   In Oct. 1996, Census and Customs agreed to allow exporters to send faxed copies of their SEDs to their carriers. This was done to speed up the movement of documents to the port of export and to allow carriers to meet their outbound manifest requirements.
   The agencies said that the best option to file export commodity and transport data is through the Automated Export System or Census' Internet service, AESDirect.