As reported by LM earlier this week, an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) was issued by United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), entitled “Heightened Import Disclosures for Supply Chain Visibility,” which is focused on improving visibility into the supply chain of goods into the U.S. CBP officials explained that this ANPRM would help to “more effectively detect, stop, and prevent illicit imports that evade U.S. customs and trade laws.”

CBP said that this ANPRM stands in support of an executive order issued by the White House in June, entitled “Strengthening Customs Enforcement,” which addresses what it called long overdue U.S. customs reform.

The EO explained that customs enforcement is viewed as essential to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and economy, adding that effective customs enforcement prevents the importation of unlawful and dangerous goods, ensures importers of record (IORs) are correctly identified and accountable for duties owed; and guarantees compliance with numerous federal laws, including laws that govern forced labor, rules of origin, origin marking, intellectual property, revenue collection, and product safety.

In the ANPRM, CBP is focused on:

foreign export documentation, with importers possibly having to provide or retain documents that their foreign suppliers submitted to foreign customs authorities, for things like export declarations, commercial invoices, packing lists, certificates of origin, export licenses and permits, and bills of lading and air waybills—and use these documents to compare foreign export information with U.S. entry information and identify discrepancies, fraud, undervaluation, or other violations;
more detailed identification of supply chain participants, noting that the existing Manufacturer/Shipper Identification (MID) system does not provide enough reliable information, and CBP is considering replacing or supplementing the MID with full legal company names and addresses, manufacturer, producer, shippers, exporter, seller, and possibly distributor information; and
technology and supply chain traceability, with CBP potentially wanting importers to use technology to provide better visibility into where goods are made and how they move through the supply chain, with a focus on AI, supply chain tracing platforms, technology for verifying raw material origins, tamper-proof credentials; digital entry identifiers, and integration with CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE)

Pete Mento, Managing Director and Practice Leader for Global Trade Management at Baker Tilly provided LM with a detailed overview on this ANPRM and what it means for shippers in the Q&A below.

LM: What are the biggest shipper takeaways from this ANPRM, in terms of its pros and cons?

Mento: The biggest takeaway is that this is much bigger than a customs-entry change. CBP is effectively asking whether importers should be able to identify who made the goods, who exported them, who moved them, what was reported to the foreign government, what technology platforms touched the transaction and, potentially, what happened much farther upstream in the production process.

That is not simply a new data requirement. That is a supply-chain governance requirement.

The good news is that CBP is right about the underlying problem. The Manufacturer Identification Code (MIC) was designed in 1986. It has had a good run, but so did the fax machine. It is not always unique, it does not always identify the party CBP is actually interested in and it may not be available early enough to be useful for targeting. Better business identifiers, better information about the actual participants in the transaction and better reconciliation of foreign export data could make it considerably harder to hide dual invoicing, illegal transshipment, origin manipulation and other forms of evasion.

That is good for legitimate shippers. Companies that spend real money building compliant supply chains should not have to compete against companies whose trade strategy is essentially, “Maybe Customs won’t notice.” If better information allows CBP to focus on the genuinely risky cargo, compliant importers should benefit through fewer unnecessary examinations, fewer repetitive requests and faster, more predictable clearance.

The downside is that the importer may be given responsibility for information it did not create, does not own and, in many cases, cannot easily obtain. A foreign export declaration may have been prepared by a factory, trading company, consolidator, exporter or logistics provider. It may be in another language. It may use a valuation or classification concept that does not line up neatly with the U.S. entry. And the importer may not have a direct contractual relationship with the party that filed it. CBP’s own questions recognize all of these complications.

Reasonable care is a legitimate standard. But reasonable care cannot magically produce a foreign government document that a supplier refuses—or is legally unable—to provide.

From a supply-chain perspective, that is where this gets very real. If these data elements have to be available earlier, then compliance has to move earlier. Supplier onboarding changes. Purchase contracts change. Broker procedures change. ERP and transportation systems change. Someone has to translate the documents, reconcile the discrepancies, validate the identifiers and decide whether the cargo can move when the information does not match.

A documentation issue that once might have been addressed after entry could become a release issue before the goods ever leave the foreign port. That means more lead time, more exception management and potentially more inventory. It also creates a very real risk that importers will favor larger, technologically sophisticated suppliers over smaller factories and trading companies simply because the larger company can produce the required data. That may improve transparency, but it could also reduce sourcing flexibility and increase concentration risk. CBP is specifically asking about earlier filing, small-business costs, scalability and possible disruption to critical goods, which tells you the agency understands that this is not a minor operational change.

My view is that greater visibility can be a very good thing—but it has to be a trade. If industry gives CBP better information earlier, CBP should give compliant industry better decisions earlier. That means meaningful pre-arrival certainty, fewer redundant requests, better targeting and real CTPAT benefits.

Otherwise, we have not modernized trade. We have simply built a much more expensive paperwork machine.

LM: Is this overdue, in your opinion? If so, why do you think it took a while to get to this point?

Mento: Yes, the modernization is overdue. We are trying to regulate a 2026 supply chain using an identification methodology created in 1986. Today, a product may pass through multiple factories, subcontractors, trading companies, consolidators, digital marketplaces and logistics platforms before it reaches the United States. CBP may see the final commercial snapshot, but not necessarily the movie that produced it.

The idea that Customs needs better upstream visibility is common sense. But I would draw an important distinction: modernization is overdue. A requirement to collect every available document is not necessarily modernization.

It took this long because collecting more data is easy. Determining who owns the data, who can validate it, who should transmit it and who gets punished when it is wrong is extremely difficult.

The legal responsibility for the entry generally rests with the importer. The facts, however, may sit with a supplier on the other side of the world. That supplier may not use the same systems, speak the same language, follow the same recordkeeping rules or understand why the U.S. importer needs the information. Visibility does not automatically mean control.

There is also no single global supply-chain data system. Information is spread across manufacturers, exporters, ERP platforms, carriers, freight forwarders, brokers, foreign customs authorities, marketplaces and third-party technology providers. Getting information from all of those systems is one challenge. Establishing that the information is authentic, complete and has not been altered is another. CBP’s questions about data integrity, interoperability, cybersecurity and tamper-proof credentials go directly to that problem.

There is a historical reason this has been difficult as well. For roughly three decades, customs modernization has been built around informed compliance, shared responsibility and reducing the amount of paper that has to be presented at the border. The government retained the right to examine the records later, but the goal was not to stop every shipment while everyone assembled a documentary biography of the product.

We should be careful not to modernize customs by recreating the old paper chase in digital form.

What has changed is both the risk environment and the government’s technological capability. Forced-labor enforcement, tariff evasion, illegal transshipment, national-security concerns and origin manipulation have made upstream information much more valuable. At the same time, AI and modern analytics allow CBP to connect entry, manifest, entity and supply-chain information in ways that were not practical before.

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