In less than a year, a joint Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security task force passed a billion dollars in trade-fraud recoveries, penalties, forfeitures and charged losses. That is not a projection. It is the figure the Department announced on July 14, 2026 (justice.gov), alongside the creation of a permanent section to keep doing it.

Two things changed at the same time, and they compound. The reward for lying about where goods came from went up, because tariffs went up. And the chance of being caught went up, because the detection stopped being people reading paperwork.

What CBP Is Actually Running Now

Customs enforcement — run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP — used to work on risk targeting: rules, history, a percentage of entries examined, and officers deciding what looked wrong.

What is being deployed now is different in kind. U.S. Customs and Border Protection awarded a multi-million dollar contract to Exiger (executivebiz.com), whose trade platform is built to examine billions of shipment records, resolve entities across hundreds of millions of organisations, and reconstruct trade routes transaction by transaction using anomaly detection.

Take those three capabilities separately, because each one closes a different door.

Examining billions of records means the comparison is no longer your entry against a rule. It is your entry against every other entry. A product that everybody else imports from one place, arriving from somewhere else at a suspiciously similar cost, is now a pattern rather than a coincidence.

Entity resolution means the network is visible. Two companies with different names, different addresses and a shared director, or a shared bank account, or a shared phone number, are one node. Restructuring the paperwork does not restructure the graph.

Route reconstruction means the layover is legible. If goods leave one country, sit briefly in a second, and arrive declared as originating in the second, the shape of that journey can be seen in the data even when each individual document is in order. And CBP is separately proposing to collect the export paperwork your supplier files at the other end, which would give it a second, independent account of the same shipment.

The Enforcement That Followed

The task force launched in August 2025. The cases named in the Department's tally are worth reading carefully, because they are not all the same kind of thing, and the difference matters.

Two were settlements resolving allegations. Perfectus Aluminum paid $549.5 million under the False Claims Act to resolve allegations of a scheme to evade antidumping and countervailing duties on aluminium extrusions — the largest civil customs settlement of its kind. Ceratizit USA paid $54 million to resolve allegations of knowingly failing to pay duties on tungsten carbide products imported from China. A settlement resolves a claim; it is not a finding against the company.

Two were admissions. Boise Cascade pleaded guilty and was fined $6.3 million in connection with illegally imported birch plywood under the Lacey Act. Royal Sovereign was convicted and sentenced, paying $8 million, over a failure to report dangerously defective imported air conditioners.

That distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a company buying certainty and a company being found to have done it, and anyone citing these numbers should keep the two apart.

The Department also announced a Global Trade and Commerce Enforcement Section inside its National Fraud Enforcement Division — a permanent home for this work rather than a temporary push. As the Assistant Attorney General put it, fraud actors have for too long viewed customs violations as a mere surcharge or cost of doing business.

Why This Is Not Only a Customs Problem

Here is the part that changes the arithmetic, and it is why the numbers above are so much larger than customs penalties usually are.

Several of these were brought under the False Claims Act. That statute is not a customs provision. It carries substantially heavier consequences than an ordinary duty demand, and it allows private parties to bring cases on the government's behalf and share in the recovery.

Think about who that describes. A former employee. A logistics provider you stopped using. A competitor who has watched your landed cost undercut theirs for two years and has formed a view about why. The enforcement risk is no longer only the chance that a government computer notices you. It is also the chance that somebody who already knows decides to say so.

The Part for Importers Who Are Not Cheating

Most people reading this are not running a transshipment scheme. The exposure is different, and it is worth naming plainly.

Boise Cascade's case involved willful blindness. That phrase is the one to sit with, because it describes a posture rather than an act. Not asking is not the same as not knowing, at least not in the way people hope it is.

If your supplier proposes routing goods through a third country and the price improves, that is a moment that now has consequences attached. So is a factory that changes its export address without explanation, or a new supplier whose price is well below a market you understand well, or an origin declaration that nobody in your business has ever tested against how the product is actually made.

Origin is not where the goods were shipped from. It is where they were substantially transformed, and a layover does not transform anything. That distinction has been the law for a long time. What is new is that it can now be checked at scale.

What Asking Looks Like

None of this requires becoming an investigator. It mostly requires that the question exist somewhere in your process.

Know where your goods are actually made, as distinct from where they ship. Know whether any component crosses a border before assembly. When a supplier's price moves sharply and the explanation is vague, treat the vagueness as the finding. Keep the reasoning behind your origin declarations written down rather than remembered, because reasonable care is demonstrated with records and not with recollection.

And ask new suppliers directly whether any part of the production is subcontracted, and where. The answer is useful. So is a reluctance to give one.

The Moral

The gap between what an importer knows and what the government can see has closed, and it closed from the government's side.

For years the practical reality was that a well-constructed paper trail was hard to disprove, which is why some people constructed them and why many more never looked too hard at the ones they were handed. That reality has changed, and the honest importer's risk is not that they will be accused of fraud. It is that they will be found to have not asked a question that, in hindsight, was clearly available.

The defence against that has always been the same and has never been technological. Know what you are buying, know where it comes from, and be able to show why you believed it.

This is general commentary, not legal or customs advice. Enforcement exposure depends heavily on specific facts, and the consequences described here are serious enough to warrant qualified counsel rather than an article. Speak to a licensed customs broker or trade attorney about your own supply chain.

So — could you show, today, how you satisfied yourself about the country of origin on your last shipment? And what do you use to keep that reasoning — the questions asked, the answers given, the evidence behind the declaration — somewhere it can be produced later, rather than in the memory of whoever placed the order?