// FIELD BRIEFING // SUPPLY-CHAIN VISIBILITY

CBP Wants Your Supplier’s Export Declaration. Your Supplier Doesn’t Work For You.

The Heightened Import Disclosures ANPRM poses a data-acquisition problem, not a legal one — and the burden lands on the brokers and forwarders who have no leverage to solve it.

By JAMES R. FERRY II, CCS, CES, CIT | Field Intelligence | September 3, 2026

On September 2, CBP published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking titled “Heightened Import Disclosures for Supply Chain Visibility” (91 FR 56408, Docket USCBP-2026-1058). It runs seven pages and asks 64 questions. Comments close December 1.

The client alerts that landed within hours accurately summarized what it says. What they did not address is what it would take to actually comply — because that is not a legal question, and the people writing those alerts do not have to answer it.

So let me answer it.

// What CBP Is Actually Asking For

The ANPRM implements Section 3 of Executive Order 14411, “Strengthening Customs Enforcement,” signed June 3 (91 FR 35125). Section 3(b) of that order directed the Secretary of Homeland Security, within 90 days, to establish a requirement mandating submission of “any documentation or information that the foreign exporter was required to submit to the foreign customs administration prior to exporting to the United States.”

That 90-day clock ran out on September 1. The ANPRM published on September 2. Read the timing for what it is: this is not an agency musing about a long-term concept. This is CBP answering a deadline.

CBP has now put meat on that bone. The categories it lists:

• Export declarations filed by the foreign exporter with its own customs authority — showing declared value, classification, and quantity
• Commercial invoices as presented to the foreign customs authority
• Packing lists verifying contents, weight, and packaging
• Certificates of origin submitted abroad
• Export licenses or permits for controlled, restricted, or dual-use goods
• Transport documents — bills of lading, air waybills — filed as part of the foreign export manifest

Question 1 asks whether the importer of record should have to submit foreign export documentation for all goods imported into the United States. Question 2 asks whether it should ride with the entry or entry summary, or live as a recordkeeping obligation under 19 U.S.C. 1508. Question 3 asks whether CBP should randomize the demand. Question 5 asks whether reasonable care is the right standard for the importer to assess and ensure the accuracy of a document it did not create.

It is worth noting what the EO section is actually titled: “Import Disclosure and Certification Requirements.” Section 3(a) contemplates importers certifying compliance with statutes including CAATSA and 18 U.S.C. 545, and closes with the line that the Secretary “shall enforce all applicable criminal fines and civil penalties in the event of noncompliance.” The ANPRM is the disclosure half. The certification half is still coming.

CBP is candid about the objective. The notice says foreign export documentation may help it verify and reconcile entry data and detect “discrepancies that could indicate violations of U.S. customs and trade laws, such as dual-invoicing.”

That is the theory of the case. It is a reasonable enforcement theory. It also runs directly into a wall that CBP has not accounted for.

// The Wall: Your Supplier Is Not a Party to Your Customs Relationship

The export declaration a factory in Vietnam files with Vietnamese customs is that factory’s document, filed with that factory’s government, under that country’s law. You are not on it as a filer. You have no statutory right to it. And unless you negotiated for it — almost nobody has — you have no contractual right to it either.

Worse, in a meaningful share of cases the supplier has an affirmative interest in not handing it over. Export declarations frequently carry a declared value that the exporter never intended its customer to see. Sometimes that is because of export VAT rebate mechanics. Sometimes it is because the exporter is a trading company sitting on a margin it would prefer you not calculate. Sometimes it is because the factory sells the same SKU to three of your competitors at three different prices, and the declaration is a window into that.

CBP asks, at Question 16, what the current lead time is for importers to obtain foreign export documentation from their suppliers. The honest answer from most of the trade is that there is no lead time, because there is no current practice. This is not a document that flows through the commercial chain. It is a document that flows from the exporter to a foreign government and stops there.

Large importers with sole-source dependence on a single factory have less leverage, not more. And the small and mid-size importers — the ones filing through you, if you are a broker — have none at all.

// Questions 10 and 11 Are the Real Landmine

If the ANPRM only asked for documents, this would be an administrative burden and nothing more. It asks for something considerably harder.

Question 10 asks how CBP should interpret and reconcile “conceptual discrepancies between the nature of the price reported to a foreign customs authority for a good upon export and the nature of the price relevant to CBP’s assessment of duties on that good upon its importation.”

Question 11 goes further: what internal controls and reconciliation processes should importers implement to identify discrepancies between the foreign export documentation and the U.S. entry summary? And “if the foreign export declaration lists a different value, quantity, or classification from that on the entry summary filed with CBP, how could the importer reconcile these differences?”

Anyone who has valued an entry knows the problem. Those numbers diverge routinely, and almost always innocently:

• Different valuation bases. Export declarations are commonly filed on an FOB basis, while the commercial transaction may be CIF or DDP, and U.S. transaction value under 19 U.S.C. 1401a requires backing out international freight, insurance, and other non-dutiable charges when separately identified. One shipment, three legitimately different numbers.
• Assists. Tooling, dies, molds, and engineering supplied to the manufacturer are dutiable additions under 19 U.S.C. 1401a(b)(1) that appear nowhere in an export filing.
• Royalties and proceeds. Same problem, same direction — additions to U.S. value with no counterpart abroad.
• First sale. Where the export declaration is filed by a middleman, a properly documented first-sale valuation will be lower than the price on that declaration by design.
• Purpose mismatch. An export declaration is prepared for the exporting country’s statistical and export-control purposes, not as a customs valuation record for a third country. The filer’s incentive to be precise on value is correspondingly weaker.
• Classification divergence. The exporting country’s tariff schedule is not the HTSUS. A mismatch beyond the six-digit level is structurally meaningless, and even at six digits it can be innocent — the exporting country may be on an older HS edition than the one the HTSUS currently implements.

CBP is asking whether a mismatch should be treated as an enforcement indicator. The practical effect of that framing, if it survives into a proposed rule, is to convert an ordinary feature of international commerce into a presumption the importer must rebut — with a reconciliation file, per shipment, built from a document it may not be able to obtain.

That is the burden. Not “collect a PDF.” Collect a PDF you have no right to, in a language you may not read (Q17), prove it hasn’t been altered (Q12), and then document why it disagrees with your own entry.

// Brokers and Forwarders: You Are in This Document More Than You Think

If you filed this away as an importer problem, go back and read four questions.

Question 43 asks whether entry should be required to be filed sooner, so CBP has more runway to review supply chain documentation before arrival — and asks explicitly how an earlier filing deadline would affect broker and carrier operations. The current 15-day window under 19 CFR 141.5 is not a luxury. Compressing it while simultaneously expanding the document set at entry is a direct operational hit on filers.

Question 31 asks what parties are best positioned to identify the manufacturer, shipper, and exporter, and whether other supply chain parties should be permitted to transmit that data to CBP directly. That is the opening for forwarders becoming data filers in their own right — with everything that implies about accuracy exposure.

Questions 35 and 36 ask which logistics platforms you and your partners use to transmit shipping instructions and book freight, at what stage, and what visibility you have into those platforms’ data security practices. LOGINK is named.

Questions 60 and 61 ask whether CTPAT minimum security criteria should be expanded to include cybersecurity and data integrity requirements, “including a prohibition on the use of covered logistics platforms identified as a security risk,” and what it would cost your organization to migrate off them.

Roughly 70 percent of CTPAT membership is small business. A rule that converts your choice of booking platform into a CTPAT compliance condition is a material change to how forwarders operate, and it is sitting in an ANPRM most of the forwarding community has not read.

Now set that alongside the rest of EO 14411, which the ANPRM does not discuss but which is the same policy:

• Section 2(f) directs enhanced and recurrent vetting for all parties conducting activities related to importation — naming customs brokers, custodians of bonded merchandise, and freight forwarders explicitly.
• Section 4(a) directs “imposing maximum penalties for brokers who, for example, fail to conduct due diligence, repeatedly represent noncompliant clients, or fail to cooperate in a timely manner with requests for information by CBP.”
• Section 4(c) directs a revision of mitigation standards to establish “a minimum penalty floor of not less than 50 percent of the assessed penalty,” a minimum liquidated damages floor, and elimination of mitigation for repeat offenders.

Read together, the direction of travel is not subtle. CBP is building toward a regime in which the filer answers for the client’s document gaps — and in which the mitigation relief that has historically absorbed those errors is capped by design. This ANPRM is where that architecture becomes visible on the operational side.

// What to Do Between Now and December 1

1. Comment. Specifically, and with numbers. CBP said plainly that the most useful comments are the ones that answer the numbered questions, supply supporting data, and describe current practice. Generic opposition will be discounted. A forwarder who can say “we surveyed 40 clients across six origin countries; 3 could obtain an export declaration on request, average lead time 11 days” will move this rulemaking more than a trade association letter. Question 62 explicitly invites small-business cost data.
2. Run the reconciliation test on your own book now. Pull ten entries where you happen to have the foreign export document — you will have a few, usually from origins where it travels with the shipment. Compare declared value, quantity, and HS to your entry summary. Count the mismatches and characterize why. That exercise is your comment, and it is also your dry run if this becomes a rule.
3. Do not wait for the NPRM to talk to suppliers. If document access is going to require contractual amendment — and for most of you it will — the negotiation cycle is longer than the rulemaking cycle. Start now with sole-source and high-value suppliers.
4. Read Q37 through Q45 if you have been ignoring the GBI test. CBP is openly considering replacing the MID with a Global Business Identifier — D-U-N-S, GLN, LEI, or Altana ID — at entry. That is a discrete, near-term data project you can get ahead of, and it is the part of this ANPRM most likely to survive into a final rule.

The docket is open for roughly 90 days. This is the last point at which the trade gets to describe operational reality to CBP before CBP describes it for us.