As of July 28, 2016, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, deployed a new AES function to assist filers reporting BIS-licensed exports.

AES began decrementing the BIS license value and now returns one or more Informational Messages to the filer. These messages will not preclude the issuance of an ITN, nor will they result in a Fatal Error. Depending on the circumstances of the filing, the filer may be notified:

• that the BIS license value has been met or exceeded by a prior filing;
• that the BIS license value has been exceeded by the current filing;
• that the allowable shipping tolerance (10% over BIS license value) has been exceeded by the current filing; and of the remaining value on the BIS license (may be negative).

So this new change to ACE reporting applies to all BIS licenses that have a value associated with it. However, there are some encryption license agreements that have an open value, so BIS has turned the decrementation off for these. They are for licenses with ECCNs of 5A002, 5B002, 5D002 and 5E002. For licenses that are based on quantity, BIS is not decrementing against them.

As far as data input is concerned, the ACE screens are not impacted, so reporting the BIS license information is the same. The only difference is the messages mentioned above.

So, what impact does this new reporting have on your record keeping? For now, companies will have to continue to monitor their shipments. Currently, there are no reports to give this back to the administrator of the company. The company would need to pay attention to the balance returned in their last transmission for this up-to-date information. Hopefully, in the future, being able to access license value in the ACE to assist a company in reviewing their license status will become a feature of the ACE reports.

By: Joe Cortez, Senior Trade Advisor