Background
The Global Business Identifier (GBI) initiative seeks to develop a single identifier solution that will improve the U.S. government’s ability to pinpoint high-risk shipments and facilitate legitimate trade, create a “common language” between government and industry, and improve data quality and efficiency for identification, enforcement, and risk assessment.
GBI is a priority initiative under the Border Interagency Executive Council (BIEC), an executive advisory board made up of more than 50 U.S. Federal agencies with import and export responsibilities. In 2017, the BIEC established the GBI initiative to address issues with the Manufacturer/Shipper Identification Number, known as the “MID” and identify potential improvements. Though the MID served the U.S. government well since the 1990s, increasingly complex global supply chains necessitate better insight into where and how imported goods are manufactured, packaged, and exported.
Evaluative Proof of Concept (EPoC)
The BIEC developed an Evaluative Proof of Concept (EPoC) that will test three global identifiers’ ability and determine the optimal combination to help the U.S. Government identify main legal entity and ownership, specific business and global locations, and supply chain roles and functions.
To improve the U.S. government’s visibility into imports, CBP is partnering with three globally recognized global identifier companies: GS1 U.S., Dun and Bradstreet (D&B), and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) to test their identifiers’ ability to, alone or together, meet the U.S. government’s needs. Those identifiers are:
Global Location Number (GLN)
Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS)
Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)
Through the GBI EPoC, CBP aims to leverage existing entity identifiers (GLN, DUNS, LEI) to develop a systematic, accurate, and efficient method for the trade to report, and the U.S. government to uniquely identify, legal business entities, their different business locations and addresses, and their various functions and supply chain roles. CBP will consider whether these three global identifiers, alone or together, ensure that CBP receives standardized trade data in a universally compatible trade language. Moreover, CBP will examine whether the identifiers submitted to CBP during the GBI EPoC can be easily verified, reducing uncertainties that may be associated with the information related to shipments of imported merchandise. Read More→
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/gbi
