Tax & Trade Blog

Canada Border Services Agency (“CBSA”) resets it “audit priority areas” twice a year. This sees CBSA designate certain tariff classification codes as CBSA’s priority areas for custom verifications (i.e., “audits”), which is based on the program areas that the CBSA believes pose significant risks for non-compliance generally in tariff classification, valuation and origin of goods imported. 

Right on schedule, CBSA has now released its January 2022 Trade Compliance Verifications, setting the stage for this year, and we have summarized some of the notable issue areas here.

With the passage of the Canada United States Mexico Agreement’s (“CUSMA”) implementing legislation on March 13, 2020, the Canada Border Services Agency (“CBSA”) has released several new Customs Notices which outline the specific implementation steps for when the agreement comes into force (which is scheduled to be July 1^st, 2020).

The International Chamber of Commerce’s (“ICC”) Incoterms® are relied on across the world by businesses to simplify and standardize the delivery of internationally shipped goods. The terms function so that the obligations on both buyers and sellers are clear, which eliminates surprises in the case of disputes. Use of the terms, in a manner consistent with the underlying international sales agreement, is critical to not only commercial obligations, but critical to the application of international taxes, including the Canadian GST/HST valued added tax.

The ICC updates Incoterms® periodically to stay up to date with modern realities in global trade and a new set of terms, to be called Incoterms® 2020, comes into effect on January 1, 2020.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is responsible for reviewing imports to ensure compliance with Canada’s trade laws. In doing so, the CBSA sometimes focuses on what it deems “audit priority” areas. These are tariff classification codes where the agency believes that there is significant risk for misclassified imports under the Customs Tariff, which leads to the unlawful evasion of duties on those goods.

The CBSA recently released its next round of 2019 Trade Compliance Verifications, which dealt with a number of these priority areas.

Canada has many rules which govern the import and export of property. However, importers and exporters are often not aware of the many supplementary laws which govern the trade of specific goods and services across international borders. One of these often-overlooked areas are the rules governing rare archeological/cultural artifacts.

A recent case from the United States has highlighted the pitfalls involved with importing and exporting rare cultural artifacts from Egypt.