Customs Compliance Review

Customs compliance is an essential business activity to ensure you are compliant with export regulations and import procedures and enhance customs planning and customs duty management. 

We assist companies in many industry sectors in the areas of customs regulations, export licensing controls, ITAR regulations, excise duty management and other international trade compliance issues.

We tackle customs compliance in a practical way and we don’t put fear and dread into companies or dwell too much on the worst side of non-compliance (eg sending goods illegally to an embargoed country). A lot of non-compliances are ERRORS, MISTAKES often caused by lack of awareness, understanding or by trying to short-cut procedures to save time and/or money. It is the role of the management of a company to ensure that, even if such non-compliances occur, there was adequate training and procedures in place to show that the individual didn’t follow standard procedures. For individuals – find out what certain things mean and know the rules – don’t feel you are pressurised internally or externally to “short-cut” or issue a statement or form because “we’ve always done it that way!”

International Trade Compliance

Customs Compliance: Areas to consider

VAT regulations – obtaining correct evidence of export and the “destination accounting” rule within the EU

The use of International Commercial Terms (Incoterms) – they are for commercial protection and if you don’t understand them properly there could be difficult consequences and additional costs.

Tariff classification – the use and selection of commodity codes both at import and export and on Intrastat declaration

Origin rules – and how the rules of preference origin (related to international trade agreements) differ

Valuation declarations – do we know the rules?

Export controls – both UK and USA (ITAR complaince and EAR): big problems at the moment are companies not understanding the following:

This is only an indication of challenges in this area of customs compliance and international trade compliance.

Find out more about how we can help you face the challenges of international trade, whether you are a well established business or just starting out on your international journey.