Scanner Cuts Time to Get Export Licenses : New Commerce Dept. Device Seen as Boon for U.S. High-Tech Firms
Employees roamed the halls of the Commerce Department, carrying boxes crammed with export license applications from American firms. Too often, the papers disappeared in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and the secretary of commerce himself would make four or five phone calls a day in search of missing licenses.
Those were the dark days of 1984 and 1985, when it took as long as 60 days to get government permission to sell sensitive electronics and technology abroad.
On Thursday, the Commerce Department unveiled an optical scanner that will read and feed license applications into a computer in 10 seconds, the newest weapon in the agency’s determined drive to save time for American exporters while still protecting national security.
About $100 billion of the nation’s $300 billion in annual sales abroad require an export license because the government wants to assure that the products and technology will not be used to strengthen the military capabilities of Communist nations or other U.S. adversaries.
The optical scanner will virtually eliminate the error rate of 5% to 8% that plagued the old system, which involved retyping the applications for computer entry. It will also ensure that all license forms are entered into the computer the day they arrive in Washington.
Use of the scanner could cut a day from the current average of 14 days for processing an application and granting a license. Earlier elements of an automation project that began two years ago have brought the average down to 14 days.
This is good news for California companies, which generate about 30% of the 400 export applications received daily at the Commerce Department. Small firms, which need quick action on their requests, should be the biggest beneficiaries, said Paul Freedenberg, undersecretary of commerce for export administration.
“Our continuing improvement in export license services to the American business community helps to move our high-tech exports to world markets while protecting our national security and foreign policy interests,” Freedenberg, who is in charge of the government’s entire export administration program, said before a demonstration of the new system Thursday.
The first license fed into the scanning system Thursday was a request by Hewlett-Packard to send $17,000 in computer parts to Finland to upgrade one of the firm’s computers in use there.
Exports requiring licenses are typically products using the “highest technology,” and there is considerable worldwide competition, Freedenberg said. American firms that would have lost sales because of delays in evaluating the national security issues are no longer at a disadvantage.
The Commerce Department’s computerized operation is now the most advanced processing system among those used by U.S. allies to license exports after security checks, according to Freedenberg. U.S. allies will be invited to study the technology used by the Commerce Department.
“The last thing we want is to have this used by the U.S. as a commercial advantage,” said Michael E. Zacharia, assistant secretary of export administration.
The goal, Zacharia said, is a “level playing field” on which all the allies can conduct thorough but rapid investigations of licenses on national security grounds. Then the businesses in all the allied countries can compete on the price and quality of their merchandise--no one would have a time advantage in making a foreign sale because of delays in granting licenses.
In January, the Commerce Department opened an electronic licensing network, enabling companies to submit their license requests by computer. However, only 14% of the applications are received on this network, usually from large corporations, while 86% arrive in the mail.
Big Savings Expected
It takes 30 contract workers in two shifts a day to enter the written applications in the computer. The total bill is $800,000 a year.
The new procedure for scanning written applications, which began Thursday, will require five workers in a single shift and will cost $200,000 a year.
The $550,000 system, which includes computers by Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, Calif., and two scanners by Palantir Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., is expected to save the Commerce Department enough money to pay for itself in a single year.
