On 2 September, US Customs proposed a 64-question rulemaking that would replace a decades-old product identifier and let CBP demand the export paperwork your own supplier files with its home customs authority

What actually happened on 2 September

CBP's ANPRM implements Executive Order 14411, which President Trump signed on 3 June 2026 to direct federal agencies to tighten customs enforcement against illicit trade and transshipment used to evade US duties. The notice does not propose finished rule text. Instead it asks 64 questions, organised around four themes: which parties in a supply chain an importer should have to identify beyond today's importer of record (manufacturers or producers, shippers, exporters, sellers, distributors and packagers are all named as candidates); whether importers should be required to obtain or retain the foreign export documentation their suppliers already generate, export declarations, commercial invoices, packing lists, certificates of origin, export licenses or permits, and transport documents, before goods leave the country of export; whether the existing Manufacturer or Shipper Identification Code (MID), an abbreviated code built into every entry, should be replaced or supplemented with a more detailed global business identifier; and what supply-chain tracing technology, including AI-driven tools, could verify all of it and help CBP detect illegal transshipment. CBP is also asking whether any of this should change CTPAT program requirements for its own trusted-trader participants. The agency has stated the goal is to more effectively detect and interdict illicit importations, particularly goods illegally transshipped to evade US customs and trade law. Comments can be filed through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at regulations.gov under docket USCBP-2026-1058, and are due by 1 December 2026.

The numbers behind the ANPRM

One number shows how granular CBP is willing to get before writing a single line of binding text. One is how long the trade community has to respond. The third is how far past the importer of record the agency is already looking.

The real subject: whether product data, not just customs data, should travel with every shipment

A standard US customs entry today rests on two things: a tariff classification for the goods and an importer of record, an abbreviated MID code, accountable at the border. Neither one says, in a verifiable way, which factory actually made a specific shipment, what documentation that factory's own government required before it could leave the country, or whether the party named as manufacturer on the entry is the same party a foreign customs authority recognises as the exporter. That gap is exactly where transshipment fraud lives: a shipment can be relabelled, re-routed through an intermediate country, or attributed to a different named party, and an aggregate product-category code plus a compact identifier code will not catch it on its own. CBP's 64 questions read like an attempt to close that gap from the product-data side rather than the tariff-schedule side: replace or supplement the MID with a global business identifier precise enough to name the actual manufacturer or packager; require the export-side paperwork that already exists in the exporting country, so a US entry can be checked against a document a foreign customs authority already validated; and bring in tracing technology to verify the link between the two automatically, at scale, across millions of entries a year. None of this is written into binding text yet. But it treats the underlying vulnerability as a data-quality problem, not a rate-schedule problem, which is a different kind of fix than most customs enforcement stories describe.

Why it matters for brands

No brand has a new legal duty today because of this ANPRM. But 64 detailed questions, covering exactly which documents, which parties and which identifiers a future rule might require, function as a fairly precise blueprint of where a binding regulation would land, and the comment window closes on 1 December 2026. Retail, consumer-goods and luxury brands importing into the US, directly or through a customs broker, should treat the next three months as a diagnostic window rather than a wait-and-see one. The concrete test is whether a compliance team can already produce, at the SKU level and not just as a company-wide assurance, the verified identity of the manufacturer or packager behind a given shipment, the export-side documentation that manufacturer filed with its own country's customs authority, and a mapping from that identity to the MID or business identifier already on file with CBP. A brand that can answer that today is positioned to comment from operational fact rather than generalised objection, which is what the ANPRM itself asks commenters to provide, and to adapt smoothly if the eventual rule adopts anything close to what it is asking about. A brand that cannot is the one for whom a future finalized rule turns into an expensive scramble to retrofit SKU-level traceability across a live supply chain, rather than a comment filed calmly before the requirement is locked in.

Two ways to read 2 September

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