Customs and Border Patrol officials aren’t sure whether or why staff at various U.S. ports decline to examine maritime cargo shipments that have been deemed “high-risk” for smuggling weapons or drugs into the country because the agency doesn’t keep reliable data on the process.
The inconsistencies create a situation in which a high-risk shipment could slip past officials without being properly scanned, the Government Accountability Office found.
CBP officials can waive the requirements to examine high-risk shipments if they can provide an “articulable reason” why the shipment isn’t actually high-risk, such as an error in the data.
“For example, a shipment could be identified as high risk because it is associated with a shipper on a terrorist watch list, but through further research, CBP officials determine the shipper is not a true match to the terrorist watch list and, therefore, the shipment should not be considered high risk,” GAO said. CBP officials at some ports weren’t properly documenting the process.
The border patrol officials could also forego an examination if they could cite a “standard exception” to the high-risk examination requirement.
Examples of standard exceptions were not included in the report because CBP considers them “sensitive information.”
But instead of having an agency-wide set of situations in which the examination requirement could be waived, the standard exceptions were established locally by individual CBP officials “on the basis of their experience and institutional knowledge.”
The GAO determined that CBP overstated the number of high-risk shipments, though it could not determine by how much because it lacked accurate data on the number of such shipments.
Various factors contributed to CBP’s data problems. For example, three high-risk shipments were recorded as not examined that actually were “because of confusion over who was to record the examination.”
Go here to read the full GAO report.
