CBP Heightened Import Disclosures ANPRM: Comments Close 1 December

There is a document filed with Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican customs before your goods leave. You have probably never seen it.

It may be your supplier who files it. It may equally be a trading company, a distributor, a consolidator or a third-party logistics provider, which is the range CBP itself names. Either way you may have no contractual right to it, limited ability to verify it, and no visibility into the value or classification declared on it.

US Customs and Border Protection is now asking whether you should have to hand it over. Its own phrase is the broader one, foreign export documentation, so whatever that filing is called in the country where it was made, it may be in scope.

The vehicle is an advance notice of proposed rulemaking published on 2 September 2026, open for comment until 1 December. Two of its 64 questions matter far more than the rest if you import through a third party, and they are covered below.

Carra Globe provides importer of record and exporter of record services, so we have a commercial interest in your answer. What follows is written to be usable whether or not you ever speak to us.

What CBP actually published

Is this a rule I have to comply with? Not yet. It is an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which is the stage before a proposed rule. Everything in it is posed as a question rather than a requirement. Comments close on 1 December 2026, after which CBP may or may not draft a proposed rule. This notice by itself imposes no new foreign export documentation requirement at the border. Other provisions of the executive order behind it are moving separately.

The document is titled “Heightened Import Disclosures for Supply Chain Visibility”, sits at 91 FR 56408 under docket USCBP-2026-1058, and contains 64 numbered questions across three proposals. CBP states its purpose in one sentence: it wants to “more effectively detect and interdict illicit importations, especially those that are illegally transshipped to evade compliance with U.S. customs and trade laws”.

The trigger is Executive Order 14411, signed 3 June 2026, which we covered when it landed in our note on the customs enforcement executive order and the new IOR bond and vetting rules. Section 3(b) of that order directs the Secretary to mandate 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”. This notice is CBP working out how.

One detail signals how seriously CBP is taking it: the agency designated this a significant regulatory action under section 3(f) of Executive Order 12866, and it has already been through Office of Management and Budget review.

Proposal one: the filing your supplier made at home

CBP is not asking only about export declarations. It uses the broader term foreign export documentation, and lists six categories:

• Export declarations made to the foreign customs authority
• Commercial invoices showing the value declared to that authority
• Packing lists
• Certificates of origin submitted there
• Export licences or permits
• Transport documents filed as part of the foreign export manifest

The point is reconciliation: comparing what was told to the foreign government against what was told to CBP. The notice names the fraud it is hunting, “dual-invoicing”. The practical problem is that the document may have been created and filed by another party, in another jurisdiction, under that jurisdiction’s rules about who may see it.

CBP knows this, which is the most useful thing about the notice. Question 7 asks, in terms: “What are the challenges for importers of record associated with obtaining and retaining of any documentation submitted to foreign customs or export authorities? Do importers already retain such documentation, and if so, for what purpose?”

Whether an exporter in a given country may share its customs filing with its overseas buyer varies by jurisdiction, and in several major sourcing markets we could not establish the position from an official source. That is a question for the exporting country’s rules and your supplier’s own advisers, not one to assume either way.

Two further questions deserve more attention than they will get. Question 10 asks how CBP should 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 import. That matters because a gap between the two figures is not automatically evidence of undervaluation. The two figures may reflect different valuation concepts or different transaction circumstances, and CBP is asking industry how such differences should be reconciled.

Question 12 is the harder one: “How can the importer ensure that the foreign export documentation provided to CBP is the exact document submitted to the foreign customs administration, and has not been modified?” That turns document collection into an authenticity problem, and CBP is asking the trade to solve it rather than proposing an answer. Question 16 is plainer and worth answering from your own data: what lead time do importers currently need to obtain these documents.

Proposal two: the MID may be replaced or supplemented

The manufacturer identification code is a constructed identifier, derived from the manufacturer or shipper’s name and address as given on the commercial invoice, using a methodology CBP prescribes and incorporating country of origin. It has identified suppliers on US entry filings for decades. CBP now says it is “interested in proposals to redefine or replace the MID”.

CBP’s assessment of it in this notice is unusually direct for a regulator describing its own long-standing data element:

“Although use of the MID is longstanding, it provides limited identifying information and does not always identify the actual party that may be of interest to CBP for enforcement purposes and is not always available to CBP early enough in the entry process to be useful.”

One alternative CBP is examining is a global business identifier, which it defines as “a unique identifier issued by the private sector to help companies map and trace their supply chains”.

This is not a new CBP initiative. CBP has been testing it since December 2022 under the National Customs Automation Program. The test now carries four identifiers: the Data Universal Numbering System number, the Global Location Number, the Legal Entity Identifier and the Altana ID. It was renamed from its original proof of concept title in August 2025 and runs until 23 February 2027.

Two things follow for anyone importing into the US. Importers of record and licensed customs brokers can currently request participation in the voluntary test, subject to CBP approval, rather than waiting for a rule. And because the identifiers are issued through private-sector identity management organisations, adopting one can involve a procurement decision as well as a compliance consideration.

Proposal three: tracing technology and CTPAT

The third proposal asks what tracing technology businesses already use, whether importers should be responsible for using it, and whether CTPAT partners should make those tools visible to CBP. Ten questions cover scalability, integration with the Automated Commercial Environment, and protection of proprietary information.

The sharpest item sits in the CTPAT section. Question 61 asks whether the minimum security criteria should “restrict or prohibit the use of `covered logistics platforms’ (e.g., LOGINK or other foreign-controlled systems identified as national security risks)” by members or their supply chain partners, and what it would cost to migrate away.

LOGINK is China’s state-sponsored national logistics data platform, and it is already restricted in US law. Section 825 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, codified at 46 U.S.C. 50309, provides that “a covered entity shall not use a covered logistics platform”, and names LOGINK in the definition. Covered entities are federal and state agencies, federally funded port authorities and marine terminal operators at those ports, so an ordinary private importer is outside it.

The stated concern is data. The Maritime Administration advises that LOGINK “aggregates logistics data from various sources, including domestic and foreign ports, foreign logistics networks, shippers, shipping companies, public databases”, and that its use in critical port infrastructure “very likely provide China with access to and/or collection of sensitive logistics data”.

What question 61 contemplates is extending that restriction from federally connected entities to CTPAT members and their supply chain partners, which is a much wider net. It prohibits nothing today: it asks what migrating away would cost. CBP asks separately, at question 35, which platforms you use and at what stage of the shipping process.