For the first time, the two agencies that prosecute customs fraud wrote down how they think about it. If you file Type 11 today or will file Type 13 this fall, read it as a warning shot.
Something Unusual Happened in July
On July 14, 2026, the Trade Fraud Task Force released A Resource Guide to Trade Fraud Enforcement. The Task Force is a partnership between the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, and it pulled in the National Fraud Enforcement Division, the Criminal Division, the Civil Division, the Environment and Natural Resources Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, HSI, and CBP.
The government calls it an unprecedented joint undertaking. That word is doing real work. DOJ and DHS do not usually co-publish a document explaining their enforcement approach to the regulated public.
Why now? The Guide landed the same day DOJ announced the Task Force had passed $1 billion in recoveries, penalties, forfeitures, and publicly charged losses in its first eleven months, along with a new Global Trade and Commerce Enforcement Section inside the Fraud Division built to litigate these cases. A billion dollars in under a year is a program that has found its footing and wants the trade to know it.
The more practical question is what a 27-page enforcement guide changes for the people filing entries every day. Let’s break it down.
The Sentence Every Importer Should Read Twice
Buried in Chapter 1 is a line that reframes how compliance failures get evaluated:
The era when a company can claim ignorance of its upstream partners’ activities is over.
That is not new law. It is a statement of posture. And the posture matters, because DOJ says it will look closely at whether a compliance failure came from negligence, reckless disregard, willful blindness to signs of fraud, or intentional criminality.
Notice what sits in the middle of that list. Willful blindness. Under the False Claims Act, “knowingly” does not just mean actual knowledge. It covers deliberate ignorance, willful blindness, and reckless disregard too. You do not have to know your supplier is transshipping. You have to have avoided finding out.
The Guide also reminds importers of something that catches people every year: the Importer of Record cannot contract away responsibility for the truthfulness of an entry. Relying on your exporter or your broker does not remove your obligation to exercise reasonable care.
Brokers Got Named Specifically
Chapter 1 cites Executive Order 14411, Strengthening Customs Enforcement, signed June 3, 2026 and published at 91 FR 35125, and points specifically to Section 4(a) for the administrative remedies CBP is now using:
- Liquidated damages claims enforced against bonds for noncompliance.
- In-bond restrictions on movement privileges.
- More audits.
- Maximum penalties for brokers who fail to conduct due diligence, repeatedly represent noncompliant clients, or fail to cooperate in a timely manner with CBP requests for information.
Repeatedly representing noncompliant clients is listed as penalty-triggering conduct. So is being slow to answer a CBP request. And the Guide flags those as examples, not as a closed list. CBP is tracking its own implementation of the order on a dedicated Strengthening Customs Enforcement page.
This connects to an obligation that has been on the books a long time and gets treated casually. Under 19 CFR 111.39(c), if a broker knows a client has not complied with the law or has made an error in or omission from a document the law requires the client to execute, the broker must promptly advise the client of it, advise on the proper corrective actions, and retain a record of that communication under 19 CFR 111.21 and 111.23.
One nuance worth catching. The regulation, as written, is triggered when a broker knows. The Guide describes the trigger more broadly, as a broker who “knows, has reason to know, or suspects.” That gap between the text and the stated enforcement posture is the practical standard you should be planning around.
If your standard practice is a verbal heads-up on a phone call, you have satisfied the first two parts and skipped the third. The record is the part that protects you.
The Guide Never Says “Type 11.” That Is the Point.
Read the whole 27 pages and you will not find the words informal entry, Type 11, Type 13, mail, or low-value shipment. The Guide talks about Forms 3461 and 7501 and about aluminum, tungsten, and diesel engines.
Do not mistake that silence for exemption. Section 592, Section 1595a, the False Claims Act, and Section 545 are all written around the entry, not the entry type. A Type 11 informal entry carries the same declaration of value, classification, and origin as a formal entry, and the Importer of Record on it carries the same reasonable care obligation. What changes at the informal level is not the exposure per entry but the count.
That matters because of where low-value volume went after de minimis. Shipments that used to clear on a manifest now clear on a Type 11 informal entry with a 10-digit HTS, a declared value, and a country of origin, filed by a broker, for an IOR, thousands of times a day. Every one of those data elements is a potential Section 592 finding, and the Guide’s culpability ladder (negligence, gross negligence, fraud) is assessed against a pattern. A classification shortcut that costs pennies on one parcel is a pattern across a hundred thousand parcels, and a pattern is what turns negligence into gross negligence.
Then there is Type 13. CBP’s new electronic informal entry for international mail moves into ACE production on September 22, 2026, replacing the interim monthly International Mail Duty Worksheet for shipments valued at $2,500 or less, and it is expected to become mandatory on October 22, 2026 for merchandise excluded from the postal process, including goods subject to AD/CVD and quota. The Federal Register notice at 91 FR 40016 (July 1, 2026) sets the entry rights narrowly: the owner, the purchaser, or a licensed customs broker appointed by the owner, purchaser, or consignee. Foreign postal operators and unlicensed third parties cannot file. The IOR must transmit twelve data elements per shipment, including a full 10-digit classification, origin, value, and total duty owed.
Put those two facts next to each other. Type 13 pulls postal traffic that has never been individually declared into ACE for the first time, and it names a broker as one of only three parties allowed to file it. Section 4(a) of the Executive Order says brokers who repeatedly represent noncompliant clients face maximum penalties. A broker filing Type 13 for a Post or a Qualified Party is, by definition, representing a client whose declaration history starts now. Your onboarding diligence on those clients is the only thing standing between “new filer” and “repeatedly represents.”
The Enforcement Toolbox, Ranked by How Much It Should Worry You
The Guide walks through the statutes available. The range is wider than most importers assume, and none of it is limited to formal entries.
- Section 592 (19 U.S.C. 1592). CBP’s administrative workhorse. Penalties scale with culpability: negligence, gross negligence, or fraud. It also applies to non-revenue violations where no duty loss occurred at all. CBP pairs it with 19 U.S.C. 1595a(b) against parties who introduce or facilitate the importation of goods contrary to law.
- The False Claims Act. Treble damages plus penalties. Reaches beyond importers to anyone who knowingly causes a violation. Private whistleblowers can file qui tam suits and collect a share of the recovery.
- The Title 18 customs crimes (18 U.S.C. 541, 542, 548, 550, 551). False classification, fraudulent invoices, bonded warehouse tampering, false refund claims, and concealing or destroying records. Two-year maximums each.
- 18 U.S.C. 545. The heavy one. Twenty years and forfeiture of the goods or their value.
- Money laundering and RICO. Sections 542 and 545 are specified unlawful activities, so any monetary transaction over $10,000 using proceeds from trade fraud can trigger Section 1957. RICO needs two predicate acts within ten years, and a RICO conspiracy charge can reach executives who never touched a filing but agreed to further the scheme.
Here is the part importers underestimate. Section 545 is not limited to whoever filed the entry. It criminalizes receiving, concealing, buying, selling, or facilitating the sale of goods imported contrary to law, anywhere in the supply chain, so long as the actor meets the knowledge requirement. The Guide is explicit that DOJ investigates down-chain actors to dismantle the demand side.
If you buy imported goods domestically and you have reason to suspect how they got here, that is your exposure too.
Forced Labor: The List Doubled
Chapter 4 covers Section 307, Withhold Release Orders and Findings, and the UFLPA. One update is worth flagging for anyone doing supplier risk work.
The original 2022 UFLPA Strategy named four high-priority sectors. The FLETF added three in the 2024 update and five more in the 2025 update. That brings the total to twelve.
Added | Sectors |
2022 (original) | Apparel, cotton, silica-based products including polysilicon, tomatoes |
2024 | Aluminum, PVC, seafood |
2025 | Steel, copper, lithium, caustic soda, jujubes (red dates) |
If your sourcing touches any of those twelve, the Guide’s message is that you should be applying the highest level of scrutiny to those supply chains. Inclusion on the UFLPA Entity List triggers an immediate rebuttable presumption that the goods are not entitled to entry, and rebutting it requires clear and convincing evidence.
Also worth knowing the difference between the two enforcement actions. A WRO rests on reasonable suspicion and lets CBP detain goods at all ports. You then have three months from importation to submit proof of admissibility under 19 CFR 12.43, and under 19 CFR 12.44 you can export the goods at any point before seizure. A Finding rests on probable cause and lets CBP seize and forfeit them. You do not get to send them somewhere else.
The Typologies Are a Self-Audit Checklist
Chapter 5 catalogs how the schemes actually work. Read it as a list of questions to ask about your own operation:
- False country of origin. Pass-through operations like simple assembly or repacking that do not meet the substantial transformation threshold. Mismarked goods can carry an additional 10 percent duty under 19 U.S.C. 1304.
- HTS misclassification. Declaring finished goods as parts, or claiming virgin material is recycled. At Type 11 and Type 13 volumes, the version of this that gets you is systematic: a default classification applied to a product category because it is faster than a correct one, repeated across every parcel.
- Undervaluation. Double invoicing, where a real invoice moves the money and a fake one goes to CBP. In the low-value channel, the same scheme looks like a declared value on the informal entry that does not match the price the consumer actually paid on the checkout page.
- AD/CVD evasion. Rates can exceed 600 percent of declared value, which makes this the highest-reward category for bad actors. Note that AD/CVD merchandise is exactly what Type 13 is being made mandatory for.
- Shell company IORs. Dissolved after entry, leaving CBP with a PO Box and an empty bank account. Type 11 and Type 13 filings make this cheaper to attempt because the IOR is often an overseas seller or a consolidator nobody in the chain has met. The entry-rights limits on Type 13 exist precisely to force a real, reachable party onto the entry.
- Drawback fraud. Claims on exports that never happened, or the same export documents reused.
- FTA fraud. Raw material shipped to an FTA partner, finished non-qualifying goods sent back with a fraudulent Certificate of Origin.
- Port shopping. Re-entering goods at a different port after a refusal. The prior refusal becomes evidence you knew the entry was contrary to law.
The dollar figures attached to recent cases are not small. Aluminum extrusions misrepresented as pallets: more than $549.5 million in civil penalties. A carmaker that installed temporary rear seats so cargo vans would clear at 2.5 percent instead of 25 percent: $365 million.
What to Actually Do This Quarter
The Guide is a reference document, not a compliance program. Turning it into one looks like this:
- Read Chapter 5 against your own book of business. Which typologies could describe an entry you filed this year, even innocently?
- Treat your Type 11 book like the pattern it is. Pull a sample of a week’s informal entries and check classification, value, and origin against the underlying commercial data. If the same shortcut appears in the sample, it appears in the population, and CBP reads the population.
- Get your Type 13 clients through diligence before September 22. If you will file Type 13 for a Post or a Qualified Party, decide now what you need from them to support each of the twelve data elements, and get it in writing before the first transmission, not after the first request for information.
- Map your twelve. Identify every supplier relationship touching a UFLPA high-priority sector and document what diligence you have done.
- Fix your 111.39 paper trail. Brokers: when you flag noncompliance to a client, put it in writing and keep it. That record is your defense.
- Check your five-year retention. Both IORs and brokers carry it under 19 U.S.C. 1508. Gaps surface exactly when you need the documents most.
- Look at your COO documentation, not just your COO field. Substantial transformation is a legal conclusion. Can you support it if someone asks?
- Escalate compliance out of operations. The Guide describes a culture of adherence running from the logistics manager to the C-Suite and boardroom. If trade compliance has no reporting line above the logistics manager, that is the gap.
Where CustomsCity Fits
Enforcement starts with what you transmitted. Every penalty theory in the Guide traces back to a data element that was wrong, missing, or unsupportable at the time of filing, and at Type 11 and Type 13 volumes there are a lot of data elements.
CustomsCity is the filing layer for that volume. Our ABI platform handles Type 11 informal entries, ACE entry transmission, PGA Message Sets, ISF, in-bond 7512, and air and ocean eManifest, and our Type 13 product converts the shipment-level data you are holding today in spreadsheets and worksheets into ACE-ready EDI for the September 22 go-live. Entry data and PGA data live in one system with one transmission record.
That matters for two reasons. Consistency, because data re-keyed across disconnected systems is where the mismatches that become Section 592 patterns get introduced. And traceability, because when CBP sends a request for information on a filing from eight months ago, the speed of your answer is now itself a scrutinized behavior.
The Guide is public and the priorities are stated. The importers and brokers who come out of this period cleanly will be the ones who treated it as a checklist instead of a news item. Request a demo to see how CustomsCity supports Type 11 and Type 13 filing.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. It states plainly that it does not create rights or defenses and does not offer legal advice, and that it does not limit the enforcement intentions or litigating positions of any agency. What it does is tell you how DOJ and DHS think about existing statutes and where they are focusing.
Yes. The Guide does not mention entry types at all, and none of the statutes it relies on are limited to formal entries. Section 592, the False Claims Act, and Section 545 attach to the declaration, and an informal entry is a declaration. The practical difference is volume: a systematic error on informal entries is assessed as a pattern, which is what moves a case up the culpability ladder.
Yes. The IOR is liable for underpayment or penalties resulting from misstatements even when a broker prepared them. The Guide cites United States v. Golden Ship Trading Co., where the Court of International Trade held that relying on the exporter and the broker does not remove the IOR’s own reasonable care obligation.
A WRO is based on reasonable suspicion and allows CBP to detain goods at all ports, with three months to submit proof of admissibility and the option to export before seizure. A Finding is based on probable cause and allows CBP to seize and forfeit them. Re-export is not an option once a Finding applies.
Twelve. The original four were apparel, cotton, silica-based products including polysilicon, and tomatoes. Aluminum, PVC, seafood, steel, copper, lithium, caustic soda, and jujubes have since been added.
Potentially. Section 545 reaches anyone who receives, conceals, buys, sells, or facilitates the sale of goods imported contrary to law, if the knowledge requirement is met. The Guide states that investigating down-chain actors is a deliberate strategy.
Your documentation habits. Written client notifications, retrievable records, and support for country of origin claims. Those cost little and are exactly what gets examined when culpability is being assessed.
