Choosing your customs broker
It is an important decision. Why? Your custom duty exposure and the efficiency of clearing your goods affects:
- Your company’s margins
- Your company’s profitability
- Your company’s dealer satisfaction
- Your company’s competitive position in the market
- Your company’s shareholder satisfaction
- Your company’s share value
- Your company’s future
You depend on your customs broker to classify your goods correctly and to insure you are paying the minimum amount of duty permissible by law.
This is a significant challenge for your company because there are so many SKUs to classify correctly. It’s a big job, especially with SKUs being added every year. Any misclassification or omission can expose your company to penalties and interest, or create duty overpayments which erode your profits and margins and increases your GST .
ALB brings a level of expertise in tariff classification, duty relief provisions and duty reduction mechanisms which is unrivalled in North America. For example, our experts have won more than 30 Canadian International Trade Tribunal (CITT) rulings gaining our clients many millions of dollars in duty relief and refunds.
Many of our clients stem from consulting work done by ALB Consulting Group. These companies are sophisticated importers who relied on big name custom brokers which ended up misclassifying their goods. In each of those instances their previous custom broker as well as the Canada Border Services Agency were proved wrong in their interpretation of the Customs Tariff, which resulted in significant monies being refunded as well as saved going forward. These refunds and savings are often much more than years of their custom brokerage clearance costs.
Who will you pick to help you with your win/loss record? The brightest and the best at a fair price? Or the cheapest?
Today’s import challenges
Canada has set up its own custom regulations to protect itself against import and export abuses and to maintain a high level of economic control. Custom regulations and custom guidelines are essentially the “rules of the game” which must be followed by all importers and exporters. There can be significant penalties if the custom agency deems an importer to be non-compliant. The problem is these rules and regulations keep changing and are often quite complex, vague and open to interpretation. How then, can you avoid being victimized, or being placed in a compromising situation, or being subject to penalties because of these regulations? And what must you do to maximize the benefits available from adherence to these custom regulations?
A realistic and cost effective approach is to seek out the expertise you need and engage the right experts to join your team. ALB can help your company through CBSA Compliance Audits, and advocates on your behalf.
Understanding your needs
Your company has probably been growing very fast for the past few years You need a customs broker that understands your industry and can help you grow your business.
Who we are?
Simply put, we conduct unprecedented research and acquire better information faster. Sometimes we use the Access to Information Act to obtain disclosure of secret duty relief decisions. Over the past 20 years we’ve uncovered over 12,000 duty relief decisions that were never published.
Did you know that tariff classification and duty relief is a moving target impacted by many different sources? New rulings and decisions are issued every week. See the list.
Do you see how many sources of decisions and rulings are unpublished? How would your broker know about the unpublished decisions and rulings issued last week?
It is a full time job staying on top of the meanings of all of the published opinions, rulings and court decisions. But, what about the unpublished ones? Who researches that? We do.
On certain matters no one else has conducted the research we have. How do we know? Government sources have told us. “You are the first ones to ask us for this information and we are not sure how to generate the report.”