Customs Administration to Require Declarants to Conduct Substantive Reviews, Cracking Down on Under-Invoicing and 'Export by Proxy' Practices

On May 26, the General Administration of Customs released a draft announcement titled "Announcement on Matters Related to Customs Declarants' Legally Fulfilling Reasonable Review Obligations" for public consultation. The draft proposes to upgrade declarants' existing "formal review (requiring only consistency between documents)" to a "substantive review," specifying eight key areas for examination. These include: verifying the client's qualifications and the authenticity of the agency relationship; ensuring the commodity name, quantity, and specifications fully match the supporting documents; not blindly accepting the HS codes provided by clients and verifying applicable regulatory requirements; checking declared values to prevent under-invoicing and concealment; verifying the authenticity of licenses and certificates of origin; confirming the consistency of information for consignors and consignees with the documents; and reviewing the logical consistency among all sections of the customs declaration form. Simultaneously, a mechanism for compliance facilitation and violation penalties will be established. Once implemented, the new regulations will impose comprehensive, chain-penetrating supervision and joint liability on foreign trade and cross-border e-commerce cargo owners, customs declarants, freight forwarders, and logistics providers. The room for gray-area operations such as 'export by proxy,' modifying product names to under-report values, or using shell companies for declarations will be significantly compressed. Non-compliant, small-scale, and disorganized enterprises may face batch elimination, accelerating the industry's shift towards specialization and compliance. [This article is sourced from Ebrun Go. An automated writing robot developed by Ebrun, it delivers e-commerce industry intelligence through algorithms as fast as possible. This dog is still very young. Please contact run@ebrun.com or leave comments to help it grow.]