Issue #3 - International Customs Day and Compliance!

Hi there,

Thank you for being part of the Virk Trade Compliance weekly newsletter! If you like the series, don’t forget to recommend and share it with others! If you have any feedback (good or bad), feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Or just say hi! I’d love to hear from you!

Training Update

In last week’s training, I spoke about the Customs Brokerage Sales Training. It’s still a work in progress and has taken me 80+ hour to make it for you. And of course, with a training THAT good, it takes time to build and process it on the back end 🙂 . If you have a sales-team for Customs Brokerage, it will start from scratch - teaching them WHERE to start, HOW to start, WHAT to do, what PAIN POINTS to address, and SO much more. I can’t wait to share it with you soon!

Global Trade Compliance Updates

• January 26 is International Customs Day!!

• India increases import duties on precious metal.

• Switzerland eliminates import duties on all industrial goods.

• Section 301 Exclusions extended up to May 2024 only.

• Ghana is waiving import duties on EVs for the next 8 years.

• Apple’s re-designed watches can be imported into the U.S. without stepping on infringement rights.

• Switzerland-India reach an FTA agreement.

• China-Nicaragua FTA now in affect.

• U.S. GSP still not getting an update.

• Canada CARM Phase 2 to go live May 2024.

Tips on Staying Compliant

Monthly Entry Audits:

• You need to audit your Entries. It’s that simple. If you are an importer, audit your Customs Broker. If you ARE the Customs Broker, then you need to audit your own entry writers. Whether you are the Importer or the Customs Broker, it can get a bit hard to do audits if you are not savings your entry data at a SKU or Part # level. My suggest would be that you’re not saving your Entry data at SKU/Part #, then you need to start dong that. Have that conversation with your Customs Broker or team now rather than later!

Pay Duties on Time:

• One way (and the best way) to pay Customs duties on time is to set up auto-debit with U.S. Custom. If you haven’t set this up, you really need to. Get your internal stakeholder on-board, reach out to Customs to get a PUN #, and send that PUN to your Customs Broker so they can set you up for monthly statements. Once this is setup, rather than worrying on paying everything on time, you just need to do a small audit every month to make sure the entries really belong to you!

If in doubt-get a ruling:

• What’s the best way to move forward when you’re not sure what classification your product falls under? Get a ruling. Prepare ahead, say in touch with internal stakeholders for new products and if your product is hard to categorize, start the ruling process. This gives you a definite result and no one within the company can argue about it later!

Thanks for reaching this weekly newsletter. As we move forward in the future, I will be adding more information to these newsletters!

Best,

Nadeem Virk