GAO Urges More APHIS Agricultural Quarantine Inspection Fees to Cover Program Costs
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and CBP should reconsider its maximum Agricultural Quarantine Inspection fees for truck cargo, and APHIS should begin charging fees for treatment, permits, and monitoring services, said the Government Accountability Office. AQI fees don’t currently cover all of the costs of the program, with CBP having to rely on funds from its salaries and expenses budget line to make up the difference, said GAO in its report, “Agricultural Quarantine Inspection Fees.” Other measures that would help include collection of fees for vehicle, bus, vessel, aircraft, and rail passengers, and accurate reporting of AQI-related activities by CBP, the report said.
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AQI fees currently cover 62 percent of the costs of the AQI program, leaving $325 million to be covered by CBP, the report said. Fee collections are distributed so that APHIS’ portion of the program is fully funded, while CBP is left with the tab for whatever fees don’t cover. But APHIS chooses not to collect fees for some classes of passengers, even though it has the legal mandate to do so.
Another issue identified by GAO is that fee levels currently under APHIS consideration would not cover the costs of quarantine and inspection for truck cargo. Currently, trucks may either pay per entry, or may pay a yearly fee if they use an electronic transponder. The current annual fee costs the equivalent of 20 individual entries per year, but trucks with a transponder cross the border over 100 times on average, the report said. GAO noted that APHIS is trying to encourage use of the transponder, but said that by reducing the differential in fees the agency could recover more of the program’s costs.
APHIS also currently declines to collect fees for specialized AQI services like treatments and monitoring and permits for importing commodities, GAO said. While APHIS is currently considering charging for treatment and monitoring services like fumigation, it has no plans to charge for permits. According to the report, APHIS spent about $13 million on permit-related services during fiscal year 2011.
But APHIS is not the only agency at fault for the gap between AQI fees and costs. In many cases, CBP staff fail to record work on AQI-related activities, the report said. GAO found that at 31 ports and other locations, CBP did not record any work on AQI-related activities at all. This means that APHIS can’t accurately estimate program costs when calculating fees, the report said.