International Trade

International Trade

The International Trade (IT) subcommittee helps to standardize and promote international standards in data and messaging for transit, export, and import transactions.

Mission

The IT subcommittee ensures and enables relevant government agencies to exchange and share information, resulting in:

• Greater facilitation of trade
• More effective identification and elimination of security threats before they arrive at ports and borders.

The IT subcommittee model aligns with the World Customs Organization (WCO) Data Model and also supports the Customs Business Process models.

The subcommittee supports the international trade mission area by facilitating real-time information exchange for many federal, state, local, and international entities, as well as other partners.

Governance

The IT subcommittee is stewarded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Government agencies that are interested in the trade data for various enforcement, security, and financial purposes participate in the subcommittee.

Model Content

The IT subcommittee model has more than 130 types, more than 2000 code values and over 500 property elements. The IT subcommittee has been harmonized with the CBRN, Immigration, Maritime, and Screening subcommittees to eliminate redundancies of types and to enforce standardization in the representation of types across these subcommittees. IT subcommittee data elements have been and will continue to be harmonized with other subcommittees in upcoming versions of the NIEM model.

The IT subcommittee in action

CBP implemented an interoperable web service for the International Trade dataset processed through the CBP Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. The ACE system uses a NIEM-conformant Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) based mostly on trade data defined in the IT subcommittee data model. The interoperable web service is used to share the trade data with 40 Partnering Government Agencies (PGA) for various enforcement purposes.