WASHINGTON — The design for new ACE Entry Summary, Accounts, and Revenue (ESAR) features was approved last month, making way for construction to begin.

ACE is a streamlined release systems protocol mandated by the Trade Act for transmission of electronic manifest data the ACE Portal or electronic data interchange (EDI) messaging. It has been deployed to all land border ports throughout this year.

The first phase of enhanced account capabilities, called A1, is expected to be activated in a U.S.-wide deployment in 2007. Entry summary and revenue processing capabilities will be introduced over the next several years in the A2 and A3 phases.

In the first of three phases of delivery, the ability to use ACE will be expanded to allow for the creation of more types of “accounts” than the original importer, broker, and carrier accounts. Some of the new ACE participants will include sureties and Foreign Trade Zone operators.

One enhanced account management feature will include cross account access, which will be a convenient tool for users to gain access to data from more than one account using one user-ID and password. Holders of ACE portal accounts will also have the ability to provide access to authorized third party entities.

Truck drivers will gain the ability to create and maintain their own account, or be able to designate another entity to create or maintain their account.

In addition, the process for merging accounts within the ACE Secure Data Portal will be streamlined and enhanced validation and duplicate checks will be performed on master data. Broker management capabilities will become available at a national level for the exam, license, and permit processes.

Additional government agencies participating in the ACE program will have the ability to manually store license, permit, and certificate (LPC) data in accounts and will provide CBP and authorized trade users the ability to view LPC information.