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C-TPAT and Cargo Security: Sea Change

In an effort to prevent terrorists from turning container and cargo ships into weapons, Customs is counting on big business to goad partners into improving security through initiatives like C-TPAT.

By Sarah D. Scalet

September 01, 2003 — CSO — Factories need fences. Eight-foot, maybe 10-foot, fences. Barbed wire. Imposing structures that not only mark a boundary but also keep intruders out and goods in.

At least that's what Ken Wheatley had always assumed. That is, until he went on a whirlwind three-week tour of Asia in September 2002. As vice president of corporate security for Sony Electronics and a participant in a volunteer security program created by the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, Wheatley helped conduct vulnerability inspections at a half dozen of Sony's largest facilities shipping goods to the United States. Traveling with a six-person team from Japan to Malaysia to Singapore, Wheatley discovered that even things as seemingly straightforward as fences often lose something in translation.

He puzzled, for instance, over the kid-size boundary markers at some of the Asian manufacturing facilities of Sony Electronics (a U.S.-based division of Japan's Sony Corp.). "Depending on the country, a really obtrusive fence communicates something negative to the community," says Wheatley. "If I pointed out to local employees in an area with little crime that someone could easily climb over a 3-foot fence, they'd ask, Why would someone do that?" And then they'd wonder why the U.S. government was trying to impose its will upon them.

The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C-TPAT, sets parameters for how member companies should protect cargo they import from being infiltrated by terrorists and used as a weapon of mass destructiona scenario that many experts view as the nation's biggest vulnerability. The guidelines start with the kind of fence that surrounds a company's manufacturing facility and extend far out into the supply chain, to how business partners around the world order supplies and screen employees and seal containers laden with goods bound for the United States. Although C-TPAT is a voluntary program, for large companies that want their goods to get into the United States quickly, and for small companies that want those large companies' business, joining is not really an option. It's a necessity.

In fact, by issuing the guidelines Wheatley was trying to meet, the U.S. government itself is not trying to impose its will on importersnot directly, anyway. Instead, Customs is counting on companies such as Sony to do the enforcement, in perhaps the most ambitious of all the public and private partnerships that the government has made its rallying call since 9/11.

"It's to some degree 'voluntary' with both arms tied behind my back," is how Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations consultant Barry Wilkins describes the program, having helped more than 30 companies, mostly Fortune 100, through the C-TPAT process.