Clearance Is No Longer the Finishing Line

First published in Freight Business Journal, Multimodal 2026 Daily Issue 1, 29 June to 1 July 2026, page 13. Reproduced here with full republication rights.

Across the major customs regimes, the audit is moving away from the border and into the years after a declaration is filed.

In the UK, HMRC has stepped up post-clearance compliance work. Advisers including Crowe report a rise in post-import audits aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, set against a fall in customs duty revenue from £5.8 billion to £4.5 billion over the last year and government pressure to recover more. HMRC holds a four-year window to question any accepted import declaration.

The shift is structural, not seasonal. Since January 2025, safety and security declarations have been mandatory on EU imports into Great Britain. HMRC now collects advance cargo data at scale, sitting alongside duty histories and EORI-linked trade profiles. The result is a richer dataset for building risk profiles and selecting targets. Traders gain free access to their own declaration data through HMRC's Trade Reporting and Extracting service, a transparency move with a clear corollary. The authority expects accuracy to match the data it already holds.

Other regimes show the same direction. In January 2026, the Canada Border Services Agency published an updated audit target list covering precious metals, automotive rules of origin under CUSMA, steel and aluminium surtaxes, energy commodities and nine tariff classification categories. The EU reform agreed in March 2026 moves the bloc towards retrospective, data-driven checks for its most trusted traders.

The exposure is real. Errors found after clearance bring duty demands, interest and penalties under the Finance Act 2003. The Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade has pointed to a reported £4.7 million origin case involving supermarket Morrisons as an illustration of the sums in play.

For forwarders, brokers and importers, the practical message is consistent across regimes. A declaration accepted at the border is not a declaration closed. Valuation, origin and classification remain open to examination long after the goods have moved, and the records behind each entry need to be accurate, complete and retrievable for years.

Source

Freight Business Journal, Multimodal 2026 Daily Issue 1, page 13, 29 June to 1 July 2026, NEC Birmingham.

By Dominic McGough, founder of CustomsPlus® and MyCustomsInfo®.