by M. Sigmund Shapiro
February 23, 2004
Back in the Pleistocene era the National Customs Brokers and
Forwarders Association met periodically with Customs to discuss
issues concerning both sides. Our hope was always to simplify
procedures for the benefit of all.
Periodic duty payment was one of the suggestions we made to
Customs in the 1970's when I was chairman of the Customs Committee
of the Association. In those days, a check for duty had to be
attached to each Customs entry, unless a particular port allowed a
single check to be submitted daily. We thought it unwieldy and
recommended to Customs (we met with them quarterly) that periodic
payment would make sense. It only took 35 years to come to fruition.
About the same time, we harangued Customs about the handling of
entry liquidations. The law provided that the only official notice
of liquidation was a notice posted on a bulletin board in the Custom
House, ala Martin Luther's demands on the church door. This idiotic
provision dates from the original language in the Tariff Act of
1930. To alleviate the problem, Customs was forced to issue
"courtesy Notices of Liquidation" to the importer by mail. Needless
to say the courts had to rule on non-receipt by the importer.
NCBAA's Customs committee suggested, (also in the mid seventies) that
liquidation after a specific time by operation of law, would provide
the solution. Legislation passed more than a decade later helped by
declaring that entries would automatically liquidate one year from
date of entry. But Customs raised a challenge in court claiming that
automatic liquidation did not constitute a decision by Customs and
was therefore invalid!
I was delighted to see that a cure to this idiocy is part of the
miscellaneous trade bill now rattling around the halls of Congress.
If it passes, it would have taken forty years from our first
suggestion.
A prominent, now deceased, sanitary engineer, Dr. Abel Wolman
told me one day that he had good news. Fifty years before he had
been contracted by the government of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to
develop a water distribution system for them. He had just been
informed that their Parliament had finally approved it.
As can be seen, in comparison with other parts of the world, the
U. S. is ahead of the game.
I was naturally delighted to see that the current miscellaneous
trade bill currently before Congress.
