It’s ‘Crunch Time’ for US Importers Facing Tariff Deadlines
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U.S. businesses are under mounting pressure to import goods while President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs are on pause, and they’re simultaneously navigating increasingly complex filing rules when their cargo crosses the border.
Two de facto deadlines loom for companies that rely on foreign products: the estimated end of a 90-day suspension of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs in mid-July, and another in mid-August, when a separate truce of the same length expires for China. If either lapses without a deal or postponement, tariff bills could skyrocket.
“Everybody’s in agreement about these next two to four weeks being crunch time,” said Scott Dudley, head of North America ocean freight at Rhenus Logistics, a freight forwarder. “This wait-and-see approach has been a great idea for a few weeks, but now importers have to act.”
Complicating the race is the need to comply with mounting electronic paperwork that must be logged with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The agency is policing businesses more aggressively to ensure they classify their goods correctly, pay the appropriate amount in taxes and identify the proper country of origin. Failure to comply results in even greater fees and penalties.
The challenges are growing because a wave of goods is coming — the only questions are how big and how sustained it will be. Container carriers are reporting notable jumps in bookings for goods from China to the U.S. The Port of Long Beach — the second-busiest container port in the U.S. and a major gateway for trade with Asia — projects imports will rebound into the middle of next month.
One of those placing new orders is Stacy Finnerty, who runs Tumbl Trak, a gymnastics facility in Michigan. She’s already waiting on three separate equipment orders from China and says the biggest challenge is planning for the rolling policy changes.
She’s also worried about herd mentality in the face of prolonged tariff uncertainty.
“I have concerns about the mad scramble of other U.S. businesses mobilizing again and what kind of scarcity there may be now in containers,” she said. “We’re concerned about potentially having to repeat this entire process again.”
A mountain of red tape is only adding to the stress. On a webinar last week, Steven Lunn, a senior customs manager with the digital freight platform Flexport Inc., said customs entry forms now can require eight lines of tariff reporting, up from zero seven years ago under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule regime.
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“Back before 2019 — this is the time we all probably enjoyed the most — all you’re filing is your product. So you pay the duties, you have an HTS code that fits the product, boom, cleared, done, everyone’s happy. It was easy back then,” Lunn said. “Now, however, this gets very complicated.”
Flexport ranks No. 33 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest logistics companies in North America.
CBP — the federal agency that enforces tariffs and the nation’s trade laws — is cracking down on firms that don’t get it right. Through the first half of fiscal 2025, the agency completed 200 audits leading to collections totaling $134.2 million, already surpassing the sums recouped in each of the previous five full fiscal years.
Another hurdle: Cargo shippers are having a hard time keeping track of changing trade policies. While CBP posted a fact sheet on its website earlier this month laying out the new requirements, importers still don’t have all the answers they need.
An open question: Do importers need to have their cargo in the U.S. by the end of the 90-day pause on the higher China tariffs, or merely loaded in China? The temporary agreement is set to expire in mid-August.
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“That is one of those issues where we still need clarity from the administration,” Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, said on a webinar May 19. “I don’t think they’ve figured it out yet.”
A CBP spokesman didn’t provide comment.
Other difficulties importers face relate to the platform CBP uses to collect data, said Tom Gould, a compliance and tariff strategy consultant in Seattle. The onus is on the importer to ensure compliance.
When U.S. trade officials announced at a recent conference that they were reprogramming ACE — short for Automated Commercial Environment — so it can handle as many as 32 HTS codes compared with current capacity of eight, “there was a noticeable groan in the room,” Gould said.
Gould said the typical interaction a company might have with CBP is a “review” of a shipment to determine whether a product was actually produced where the filing says it was, and if the correct duty was paid. It’s conducted by an import specialist.
Audits, on the other hand, are a much more intensive process conducted by a special regulatory audit unit within CBP, and may involve inspection of a year’s worth of shipments, Gould said.
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Businesses are seeking clarity wherever they can. Hardly a day goes by without the world of customs brokers and logistics experts offering confused importers a virtual update on the almost real-time changes in the biggest increase in U.S. tariffs in almost a century.
Attendance at webinars hosted by Freightos Group, which runs a cargo booking platform, is up almost 25% from November and exceeded 1,100 participants in April, according to Chief Marketing Officer Eytan Buchman. Topics range from how to analyze logistics data to fool-proofing strategies for procurement.
“There is absolutely a massive spike in demand for information,” Buchman said. “The rapid volatility, ambiguous policies and uncertainty of what’s coming next is daunting for businesses whose bottom lines literally depend on how sub-articles in trade policies are interpreted.”
