CBP Comes Looking.
We defend the audit and limit the damage — Focused Assessment defense, prior disclosure, reasonable care evidence, and penalty mitigation handled by advisors who also file the entries under review.
Trusted by leading importers & manufacturers
Customs audit support is what you need when CBP moves from processing your entries to examining them. The most common form is the Focused Assessment, a risk-based audit run by CBP's Regulatory Audit and Agency Advisory Services in which auditors evaluate your internal controls first, then test transactions if those controls look weak. There are also Quick Response Audits aimed at a single issue and Audit Surveys.
This is the enforcement-defense side of compliance, distinct from the program-building work in our customs consulting practice. Consulting builds the controls before anyone is watching; audit support defends those controls, or fills the gaps, once CBP has opened a file. When the audit surfaces underpaid duty or misclassification, the exposure runs through 19 U.S.C.
The most powerful tool we bring is the prior disclosure. Filed under 19 U.S.C. 1592(c)(4) before CBP formally starts or communicates an investigation, a valid prior disclosure sharply limits the penalty and generally caps your exposure at the lost duty plus interest. That is why moving fast matters.
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USC penalty statute we work
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Culpability defense
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Six advisory services our customs experts use to defend a CBP audit and limit what it costs you.
We review the audit notice or your entries and baseline where your real penalty exposure sits.
We run a control-based self-assessment mirroring CBP's method to find issues before the auditor does.
We decide whether a prior disclosure is warranted, quantify the loss of duty, and prepare the tender.
We manage the audit response, file any disclosure, and build the penalty petition where one is needed.
We correct open entries, close each finding with a corrective action plan, and recover overpaid duty.
A CBP audit or penalty notice is not the time to figure out where your records are. Reasonable care is a legal standard the importer of record owns, and an audit is where the government tests whether you actually met it.
CargoTrans defends the audit from a prepared position, files a prior disclosure where it protects you, and argues your culpability down when a penalty is on the table.
The real-time Control Tower gives your compliance team a live view of entries, documents, and exceptions, so when CBP requests records for an audit sample, the supporting file is already assembled instead of reconstructed from scratch under a government deadline.
Behind it, Captain Trade Compliance keeps each classification, valuation, and origin decision attached to the entry it defends, and connects to our customs consulting program so the reasonable care an audit asks about already exists as a living record.
A prior disclosure filed under 19 U.S.C. 1592(c)(4) before CBP starts or communicates an investigation is the single most effective way to limit a customs penalty, generally capping exposure at the lost duty plus interest instead of a multiple of the merchandise value. The timing and the completeness are everything, which is why we assess eligibility and quantify the loss quickly.
Because our consultants sit beside the brokers who filed your entries, the disclosure is built from the actual records and tendered with the correct loss-of-duty calculation, and where the issue is a duty rate or an origin question we bring in our country-of-origin desk so the disclosed position is defensible rather than a rushed admission that creates new exposure.
A Focused Assessment is a risk-based audit conducted by CBP's Regulatory Audit and Agency Advisory Services. It is built in phases. Auditors first evaluate your internal controls through a pre-assessment survey, testing whether your compliance program is designed and operating well enough to produce accurate entries. If your controls look adequate, the audit can conclude without deep transaction testing. If they look weak, the auditors move into detailed testing of individual entries for classification, valuation, origin, and other issues, which is where findings and duty demands come from. The core insight is that a Focused Assessment is won or lost on your internal controls first, not just on individual transactions. We prepare the control narrative and questionnaire response so the audit stays contained rather than escalating into full transaction sampling.
Customs consulting is proactive program building. It creates your reasonable care controls, responsibility matrix, and workflow before anyone at CBP is looking, so your entries are defensible by design. Customs audit support is what you need once CBP has opened a file, whether that is a Focused Assessment, a Quick Response Audit, an audit survey, or a penalty notice. It is enforcement defense: managing the audit, testing your own exposure the way the auditor will, filing a prior disclosure where a real problem exists, and arguing your culpability down if a penalty is proposed. The two are connected, because a strong consulting program is exactly what makes audit support easier, but they are different engagements with different urgency. If CBP has already contacted you, you are in audit support, and the clock on options like prior disclosure may already be running.
A prior disclosure is a formal notification to CBP, under 19 U.S.C. 1592(c)(4), that you violated the customs laws, made before CBP has started or told you about an investigation into that violation. When it is valid and perfected, a prior disclosure dramatically reduces the penalty. Instead of facing a penalty that can reach a multiple of the merchandise value for negligence, or the full domestic value for fraud, your exposure is generally limited to the loss of duty plus interest. The catch is timing: the disclosure only works if you file it before CBP formally commences or communicates its investigation of that specific issue. That is why, when we find a genuine problem, moving quickly is essential. Once CBP contacts you about the issue, the door to a prior disclosure on it can close, and with it the biggest available reduction in exposure.
19 U.S.C. 1592 is the core customs penalty statute. It prohibits entering or attempting to enter merchandise into the United States by means of a material false statement, document, or omission. The penalty amount is not fixed; it scales with your level of culpability across three tiers. Negligence, the failure to exercise reasonable care, carries the lowest penalty. Gross negligence, an act done with actual knowledge or reckless disregard, carries more. Fraud, a knowing and intentional violation, carries the most, up to the domestic value of the merchandise. Because culpability drives the number, most audit defense work is really about keeping the government's characterization at the lowest defensible tier. We build the record and the petition that show reasonable care and support negligence rather than the higher tiers, which is often a far larger swing than the underlying duty itself.
Reasonable care is the legal standard U.S. customs law places on every importer of record. You are responsible for classifying and valuing your goods correctly, declaring accurate origin, and providing truthful information to CBP, and you must be able to show you took reasonable steps to get it right. An audit is precisely where CBP tests whether you met that standard, because reasonable care is the line between an honest mistake and negligence under 19 U.S.C. 1592. If your entries were wrong but you can show documented classification logic, tracked rulings, and organized records behind each decision, you are far better positioned than an importer who simply relied on a broker and kept nothing. When care evidence is thin, we reconstruct and organize it, and going forward we build it into the entry so it exists before the next audit rather than after.
Do not respond substantively before you understand your exposure. The first move is a controlled assessment: read exactly what CBP is asking, identify the entries and issues in scope, and run your own internal test of those transactions the way the auditor will, so you know what they are likely to find before you answer. That internal look also tells you whether a prior disclosure is still available on any issue, which is time-sensitive and can be lost if CBP formalizes the investigation first. From there we manage the response, prepare the internal control narrative that a Focused Assessment turns on, and organize the records that support your filed positions. The mistake to avoid is answering piecemeal and volunteering conclusions before you have tested your own file, because early inconsistent statements are hard to walk back later.
An internal compliance assessment is running the audit on yourself before CBP does, using the same control-based approach and transaction sampling the auditors use. We test whether your internal controls actually enforce correct classification, valuation, and origin, then pull a sample of entries and check them against the records that should support them. The output tells you where your real exposure sits, ranked by product and process, and whether any of it rises to the level where a prior disclosure is warranted. It is valuable in two situations: when an audit is announced and you need to know what will be found, and proactively, when you want to catch and fix problems while a prior disclosure is still available. Either way, testing yourself first means you are never surprised by your own file in front of a government auditor.
Yes. If CBP issues a pre-penalty notice or a penalty notice, you have the right to petition for relief before the penalty is finalized, and there is a supplemental petition stage after that. The petition is where you argue the government's culpability characterization down, from fraud toward gross negligence or from gross negligence toward negligence, and present mitigating factors such as cooperation, a clean prior record, remedial measures taken, and the presence of reasonable care despite the error. Because culpability drives the penalty amount under 19 U.S.C. 1592, moving the characterization down one tier can reduce the exposure dramatically. We build the petition from the actual records and the compliance history, and support settlement discussions where that is the better outcome. Even a finalized penalty is often negotiable, so a notice is not the end of the process.
When your broker and your audit defense are the same firm, the defense is built on real knowledge of how each entry was constructed, not on an outsider reverse-engineering your file under a deadline. That matters in three concrete ways. First, the records supporting a sampled entry are already assembled, because the team that filed it knows where the classification and valuation basis lives. Second, a prior disclosure is quantified accurately, because we can calculate the true loss of duty from the actual entries rather than estimating. Third, the penalty petition and the records tell one consistent story, which is what keeps CBP at the negligence tier instead of reading inconsistencies as evidence of something worse. Importers who split advice and filing across firms often find the audit response full of gaps that a single accountable team would have closed.
It starts with a free 30-minute audit exposure review. If you have received an audit notice or a penalty letter, share it along with a sample of the entries in scope, and we will assess where your real exposure sits and whether a prior disclosure is still available, with no obligation. If you have not been contacted yet but want to get ahead of the risk, we run an internal compliance assessment to find and fix issues while a disclosure is still an option. From there we scope the defense to your situation, managing the Focused Assessment, filing any prior disclosure, building a penalty petition, and correcting open entries. Because our licensed brokers file entries daily, the defense is grounded in how your entries were actually built, and we can move directly from strategy to correcting the record.
