FAS Response to May 15, FRN of Request for a Revision of a Currently Approved Information Collection
On May 15, 2023, USDA/Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) published a Federal Register Notice requesting public comments on a proposed revision to the currently approved information collection and several questions related to requiring exporters to submit additional information to FAS in the form of contract-based reporting.
FAS received a total of 27 comments over the two-month public comment period. Twenty commenters stated that the newly proposed IT system and contract-based reporting requirement were time consuming, burdensome, and would impose additional or significant costs on the exporters. Eleven commenters stated that moving to contract-based reporting would not improve the quality and integrity of the reports published. Eleven commenters stated that technical issues of concern remained in the Test System that needed to be resolved. Several Commenters provided suggestions and recommendations for improving the Export Sales Reporting Program which were outside the scope of this Information Collection Notice. FAS is taking all comments into consideration and will consider them for future implementation if/when the ESR program updates its regulations.
Based on the feedback received from the public comments, USDA/FAS has made the decision to continue with the current practice of accepting export sales data on an aggregated basis. Given that no substantive change to the Export Sales Reporting System will be implemented, and the feedback received from exporters, the estimated burden of collecting the required aggregated sales and export information will remain at 30 minutes a week.
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| Author | Harding, Amy - TFAA-FAS, DC |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2023-10-19 |