US Customs and Border Protection has released a memo detailing their plan for enforcing ACE e-Manifest at ports where it becomes “mandatory” on January 25th. That memo is attached for download and printing (77 KB PDF).

While the memo is pretty long and confusing, there are a few important points:

1. If you can show you’ve attempted to file, you should be fine.
2. Providing a Trip Receipt is evidence of an attempt to file an e-Manifest.
3. The e-Manifest-exempted stuff is pretty rare. Chances are an e-Manifest is required for most or all of your shipments.

Two important points they didn’t mention:

1. If your driver gets stopped, hassled, etc. for an e-Manifest issue, have them politely take the CBP Officer’s name. Provide us with a description of the incident along with the Officer’s name, and we’ll either give you an explanation of what’s going on or work with CBP Supervisors to correct any misunderstanding. This will correct the situation and remove your company name or drivers from the incident.
   There is no way for CBP to correct internal training issues without knowing what happened and who to train. Jim Swanson requested this type of industry cooperation (he’s the person who wrote the attached nationwide memo).
2. If you submit an e-Manifest, it’s not necessarily smooth sailing at the border. You’ll be transmitting a few dozen pieces of information that, if wrong or inconsistent, will require your driver to work with CBP to resolve the problems.
   However, if the stars align and your data is good, you’ll be cruising down the highway.