Question: For imports, if broken out on the commercial invoice, are origin CFS and terminal fees allowable deductions? I can’t find anything that specifically states yes or no. Answer 1: Yes, you can. Here are the CBP rulings you need to look up. In HQ H004683, dated April 12, 2007, CBP explained: Transportation and insurance […]
Question: Dear Members, I am working on customs valuation projects that also includes a customs compliance and transfer pricing between two of our business units (U.K and EU). I would like to ask what is the structure of your Customs Valuation SOP? What did you include? Any reference online for structure? I would be very […]
Question: Our customer accidentally combined an FOB and CIF order in the same container. There are two commercial invoices, one is CIF and one is FOB. The CIF invoice is showing 1552.50 for freight and 25.40 for insurance. They included an additional invoice for half the freight and insurance charges when they realized their mistake […]
Question: We ship software licenses on pieces of paper. These are for our proprietary company software. In the past, before I got here, they would declare the customs value of the shipment as the value of the license itself (say, $3000).But I’ve always followed the practice that you declare the value of the carrier medium […]
Question: The import scenario is such that we have a sale of hardware and software programming from US seller to unrelated US buyer. The hardware is drop shipped from the Chinese manufacturer to US buyer. The commercial invoice includes the price of the hardware and the price of the software that will be programmed and […]
Question: The supplier has shipped promotional items (pens, brochures, flash disks, baseball caps, scale) into a shipment that must be declared to CA Customs. The supplier has provided their view of the fair market value, but is there a valuable tool/resource to use when determining the appropriate market values to ensure the correct amount of […]
Question: We are a trading company and we have an inquiry from a customer here to send the steel plates (HTS CODE 8543.30.9080) to a steel plant to process the coating. After the coating process, the steel plates will be sending back to our customer in USA. Here comes the questions, What is the correct […]
Question: My company imports airplane parts to the US that need repair. What value would you declare for these parts? They are not usable so I don’t think we should declare them at their purchase price, but do you declare them at their repaired price? Answer 1: There are a number of rulings by CBP […]
Question: We plan to export some equipment to an unrelated party in Chile. We want to send it to this customer free of charge. We do not expect to be paid by the recipient in Chile. We intended to include the phrase “Value for customs purposes only” on the commercial invoice. We just received notification […]
Question: Can anyone explain what an “unconditional price adjustment” is when discussing discounts related to an import? It is part of the three part test CBP applies to determine the effect of discounts lowering customs value. As for CBP, they purport to apply a three-part test for testing the effect of discounts lowering customs value: […]
Question: Good day. I was just informed by our sales department that for a specific container of product, when we sell the product, we will be sending the seller (the company we are buying the product from) half of the margin. Does this factor into the price paid in any way? I could not think […]
Question: We are moving some packaging to a facility in Mexico. The process will include shipping excess product from our US location, that was already imported from our foreign vendors, to the facility in Mexico, and shipping product from our foreign vendors directly to the facility in Mexico. Once at the Mexican facility, they will […]
