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Closure of the U.S. Customs Drawback Centers located in Boston, New Orleans and Miami became official as of January 24, 2003. The New Orleans center closing became effective on February 24, with the Boston and Miami centers closing on July 23.
Customs says that these closures will not cause a burden to the remaining five Centers. However, in order for it to not become a burden to these Centers, Customs officials will need to stay abreast of operations at each and every Center. The question emerges, will Customs be able to swiftly remedy situations involving delays?
I know for a fact that certain offices, all of which are on the remaining open list, have delay issues and they have yet to receive any of the new workload from the closing offices. Once again, Customs claims they can handle the increase.
Customs has taken another look at how they plan to divide up the drawback accounts among the five remaining Centers. They have determined that they should actually not burden the Chicago Drawback Center with Miami's unliquidated claims, so are now planning on having them sent to the Los Angeles Center. They have also decided to send the Boston Center's unliquidated claims to Chicago instead of the New York/Newark Center. Of course, this makes sense since the Los Angeles Center has less workload than the Chicago Center.
As for the New York Center, even considering to send additional workload to this Center would have made no sense at all since they are the busiest Center of the five slated to remain open. So Customs took another look and determined that they needed to make some changes due in part to the comments they received from the drawback industry. Obviously, none of the fourteen people that sent in comments to Customs regarding the proposed Center closures made an impressionable stand as to why the offices should not be closed. But with only 14 comments from our entire industry, we had little to hope for anyway.
On the bright side, Customs promises that advances in automation will continue and this in itself will reduce the workloads of those remaining Drawback Specialists. We are also told that continuing education will take place and new hires will be brought in as needed. Sounds good so far. And in the end, it doesn't appear that too many of us are worrying about it. After all, only 14 in the industry bothered to comment. Did you file comments with Customs? Why or why not? Email me a note with your thoughts on the Drawback Center closures.
For futher background on the closures, read:
> Customs Proposed Drawback Center Closures in the Dispatch November/December 2002 issue.
> Federal Register/Vol68, No. 16/ Friday January 24th - Consolidation of Customs Drawback Centers
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