USMCA Origin Records: CBP Can Audit You Back Five Years
On 1 July 2026 the United States declined to extend USMCA in its current form. The agreement did not lapse and nothing about your shipments changed that day. What changed is that the rules are now reopened every year, while CBP keeps a five year look back on every claim you have already made.
Last updated . Written for Canadian exporters by Accelerated Exposure.
What actually happened on 1 July
The Free Trade Commission held the mandatory six year joint review. Canada and Mexico both supported a sixteen year extension. The United States declined to confirm it would extend the agreement in its current form.
USMCA remains fully in force. Preferential tariffs, rules of origin, investment protections and dispute settlement all continue to operate, and the agreement runs to its built in expiry of 1 July 2036. Most coverage stopped there, which is why most businesses concluded nothing had happened.
Why an annual review matters when the look back is five years
Take those two facts together and the picture changes shape.
The criteria that determine whether a claim was valid can now be reopened every July. Meanwhile CBP can audit the five years of claims sitting behind you. A business can be entirely compliant today, watch a rule shift at a future review, and find itself holding years of certifications written against criteria that no longer match its documentation.
The exposure is not a penalty going forward. It is duties plus interest on entries you already made. And it does not arrive with a deadline or a warning. It arrives as a verification letter, by which point the five years have already happened.
What CBP can actually do
| Item | Position |
|---|---|
| Record retention | Five years from importation, under 19 CFR Part 182.101 |
| Audit look back | Five years of entries, via post entry audit |
| Missing a data element | Retroactive duty assessment plus a ten percent recordkeeping penalty |
| Goods did not qualify | Unpaid duties plus interest on every affected entry |
| Negligence or fraud | Civil penalties up to twice the improperly claimed benefit |
Where companies actually fail
Not usually on the origin determination. On the file behind it.
- A certification missing one of the nine required data elements
- No supporting records behind the origin criterion, only the certification itself
- Records held by one person, in one spreadsheet, with no retrieval process
- Blanket period certifications that quietly expired and were never reissued
- Supplier declarations never collected, so the input origin cannot be evidenced
- Nothing re-verified after a rule change, because nobody was watching for one
The line we do not cross, and we will say it plainly
Customs brokerage is a licensed profession. CBP licenses brokers under 19 CFR Part 111 and CBSA licenses them in Canada. We do not make origin determinations, we do not classify goods, and we do not give customs advice. Anyone offering you those services without a licence is a problem you do not need.
What we do is the records side. Whether all nine data elements are present on every certification. Whether the supporting evidence behind each claim exists and can be retrieved inside the five year window. Whether there is a process or just somebody's memory. And an annual re-verification after each July review, because the target now moves by treaty design.
When a determination is needed, it goes to a licensed broker or trade counsel, and we will help you find one. That is not a limitation we are apologising for. It is the reason you can trust the rest of it.
On tariff engineering, since somebody always asks
Goods are classified in the condition in which they are imported, so designing a product so that it lands in a different classification is long established and lawful. It is called tariff engineering and it is not a loophole.
It also has a hard edge. If the design is genuine, it is engineering. If a modification exists only to be reversed on arrival and the article was never really that thing, it is misclassification, and that is where the serious penalties live. Which side a specific product falls on is a legal judgment on the facts, and it belongs to counsel or a licensed broker. Not to us, and not to a page on the internet.
Common questions
How far back can CBP audit a USMCA claim?
Five years from the date of importation. That is the record retention period under 19 CFR Part 182.101, and it is also the window CBP can reach into during a post entry audit. The practical consequence is what catches companies out. A verification letter arriving today can ask about entries made five years ago, and the question will not be whether you believed the claim was correct at the time. It will be whether you can produce the certification and the supporting records behind it now. If you cannot, CBP can assess the unpaid duties plus interest on every affected entry. Where the goods did not actually qualify, penalties can reach twice the improperly claimed benefit. The clock runs per entry, so a business shipping continuously always carries five years of open exposure behind it.
What are the nine required data elements on a USMCA certification of origin?
A USMCA certification is not a fixed government form. It is a set of nine required data elements that may appear on an invoice or any other document. They are the certifier and whether they are the importer, exporter or producer; the certifier's name, title, address, telephone and email; the exporter's details; the producer's details; the importer's details; a description of the goods with the harmonised system classification to six digits; the origin criterion the goods qualify under; the blanket period where one applies; and an authorised signature with the date and the required certification statement. Missing any single one of them is grounds for retroactive duty assessment plus a ten percent recordkeeping penalty. That is why so many failures here are clerical rather than substantive. The goods qualified. The paperwork failed to prove it.
I received a CBP verification letter. What happens now?
Do not answer it from memory and do not answer it late. A verification letter is a formal request with a short response window, so the first move is to establish exactly which entries and which claims are in scope, then locate the certification and the supporting records for each one. Supporting records means the evidence behind the origin criterion, not merely the certification itself. Bills of materials, supplier declarations, production records, and cost data where a regional value content rule applies. The second move is to bring in a licensed customs broker or trade counsel before you reply, because your response becomes part of the record and shapes everything that follows. What you should not do is send a partial answer in order to look cooperative. An incomplete file is what converts a verification into an assessment.
Now you have a guy
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