Customs

Effective February 6, 2026, Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) will issue refunds electronically via Automated Clearing House (“ACH”). This rule change will affect all refunds, subject to limited exceptions (e.g., certain emergency payments, transactions involving national security or law enforcement concerns, transactions involving individuals who do not have access to banking services or electronic payment systems, etc.). FR Document 2025-24171. Also this rule will apply to all importers, brokers, filers, sureties, service providers, facility operators, foreign trade zone operators, and carriers as well as designated third parties listed on a CBP Form 4811. In short, absent a waiver, after February 5, 2026 CBP will not issue refunds by check. 

Sign at the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D

In March 2025, in a similar blog post to this one, Nithya Nagarajan and Robert Romashko forecasted that False Claims Act (“FCA”) enforcement would increase under the current tariff-focused trade policy regime. Sure enough, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) recently announced two FCA resolutions involving allegations of failure to pay customs duties and evasion of antidumping and countervailing duties.

Effective April 17, 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) has amended its regulations implementing the Enforce and Protect Act of 2015 (“EAPA”), a statute granting increased authority to investigate allegations of evasion of antidumping and countervailing duty (“AD/CVD”) orders. The amendments were issued in a final rule of March 18, 2024, and they are…

    

On March 28, 2024, CC Metals and Alloys, LLC (“CCMA”) and Ferroglobe USA, Inc.(“Ferroglobe”) (“Petitioners”), filed a petition for the imposition of antidumping and countervailing duties on ferrosilicon from the Federative Republic of Brazil (“Brazil”), the Republic of Kazakhstan (“Kazakhstan”), Malaysia, and the Russian Federation (“Russia”).

SCOPE OF THE INVESTIGATION

The following language describes…

Washington D.C., USA - March 1, 2020: Sign of U.S. Customs and Border Protection on the building in Washington D.C., USA, the largest federal law enforcement agency.

A recent ruling analyzed whether certain functions performed in preparation for filing an entry with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) arise to the level of “Customs Business” that must be performed by a licensed broker. Ruling HQ H326926, issued to Heizwerthy Customs & Freight Solutions (“Heizwerthy”), states that allowing an unlicensed company to extract…

On December 26, 2023, the United States Trade Representative (“USTR”) announced that it will further extend 352 reinstated exclusions and 77 COVID-related exclusions to duties imposed on goods from China pursuant to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 until May 31, 2024.  USTR imposed Section 301 duties in four tranches or “lists,” and…

On December 8, 2023, Senators Bill Cassidy and Sheldon Whitehouse introduced a new version of the Customs Modernization bill to amend the Tariff Act of 1930. The new proposal comes over two years after Senator Cassidy initially proposed draft legislation, which we explained in a prior post. The most recent proposed bill aims to…