Oct-15-1999

AESDirect Off to a Great Start

On October 4th, the U.S. Census Bureau opened AESDirect, its highly anticipated Free Internet SED Filing Service. AESDirect even opened its doors for business a week early for pre-registration.

"The service came on-line without a hitch, is working exactly as designed, and is doing the job it was intended for," said Robert Foley. Mr. Foley is President of FCS, the company that developed and operates the service for Census.

The service is already proving popular. In the first few days of operation, over 50 companies signed up for AESDirect. The pace of registration is continuing to increase as more exporters and freight forwarders hear of the service. Both Census and FCS have embarked upon an aggressive campaign to bring it to the attention of the trade.

The service is attracting a wide variety of companies, from small exporters to major worldwide corporations. "AESDirect makes filing with AES easy and convenient, with no start-up or ongoing costs. What more could you want?" Foley said.

AESDirect is also proving popular with AERP filers. AERP, an earlier method of electronic SED filing, will disappear at the end of 1999. "AESDirect is becoming the service of choice for AERP filers who have not developed their own connection to AES and have no desire to go back to paper filing," Foley said.

One of the unique features of AESDirect is its on-line registration and tutorial. This is proving to be a hit with users. With its fully automated on-line registration and authorization process, companies can register one day and be filing their SEDs the next business day! This is a tremendous improvement over the manual system of certification required for other methods of accessing AES, which can easily take many weeks.

Companies interested in AESDirect can go to www.aesdirect.gov, where they will find everything they need to know about registering and using the service.