A customs declaration has dozens of boxes and most of them are administrative. Three fields carry nearly all of the risk, because each one is a judgement dressed up as a number, each is derived from documents that were written for another purpose, and each can be wrong while every document in the file looks perfectly correct.
One: the commodity code
The code decides duty rate, whether a licence is needed, whether a prohibition or restriction applies, and whether the shipment is caught by a measure that has nothing to do with your industry. In the EU, an export declaration carries the 8-digit Combined Nomenclature code; an import declaration carries the 10-digit TARIC code. The first six digits are the international HS heading and subheading, which is the part that is common across countries, and the remaining digits are where jurisdictions differ.
The recurring failure is not misclassification by a specialist. It is provenance. The code on the declaration is very often the code from the buyer's purchase order, or the code the freight forwarder used last time for something similar, or a code carried forward in an ERP master record that nobody has revisited since the product changed. None of those are classification decisions. They are copies of a decision somebody else may or may not have made carefully.
Two things follow. A code that appears on your commercial invoice and a different code on the declaration is a discrepancy a customs officer can see immediately. And a code that is internally consistent across every document in the file can still be the wrong code, which is the case where consistency checking does not help you and only a classification review does.
Know where each commodity code came from. A code that is consistent everywhere and was never actually classified is the most comfortable kind of wrong.
Two: the value, which is not the invoice total
Customs value and invoice value are different figures that coincide often enough for people to stop distinguishing them. The primary method is transaction value, the price actually paid or payable for the goods when sold for export, and the law then requires specific things to be added to it and specific things to be left out.
Under the Union Customs Code, the additions include commissions other than buying commissions, the cost of containers and packing, materials and tooling supplied by the buyer for use in production, royalties and licence fees related to the goods, and transport, insurance and loading costs up to the place where the goods are brought into the customs territory. The exclusions include transport after arrival, charges for construction or assembly after import, and import duties and taxes themselves.
This is where the Incoterm does its damage. The invoice states a price on agreed delivery terms, and the delivery term determines how much transport and insurance is already inside that price and how much sits outside it. An EXW price and a DAP price for the same goods are different numbers and require different adjustments to arrive at the same customs value. Taking the invoice total straight onto the declaration is correct for some terms and wrong for others, and the document gives no signal about which case you are in.
The check worth doing is narrow and mechanical: does the Incoterm on the invoice match the Incoterm assumed by the value declared, and does the named place travel with it. "CIF" without a named port is incomplete, and "FCA Bremen" against a value that includes ocean freight is a contradiction sitting in plain sight across two fields of the same document.
Three: origin, which is two different questions
Origin is where the most expensive mistakes live, because "origin" means two things and they have different rules, different evidence and different consequences.
Non-preferential origin is the general answer to "where is this from". Goods wholly obtained in one country originate there. Goods made in more than one country originate where they underwent their last substantial, economically justified processing, in an undertaking equipped for it, resulting in a new product or an important stage of manufacture. It governs trade statistics, anti-dumping measures, quotas and marking.
Preferential origin is the narrower question of whether goods qualify for a reduced duty rate under a specific trade agreement. The rules are in that agreement and nowhere else, they are product-specific, and they are frequently stricter than the non-preferential test. Goods can be unambiguously of EU non-preferential origin and fail to qualify as originating under an agreement with a particular partner country.
The failure mode is a claim made on the wrong basis. A supplier declaration says the goods are German, so the exporter claims preference, without checking the product-specific rule in the relevant agreement or holding the evidence the agreement requires. The claim is not detected at export. It is detected at audit, retrospectively, across every shipment made on the same assumption.
"Made in Germany" and "qualifies for preference under the agreement with country X" are separate findings requiring separate evidence. Never derive the second from the first.
Where documents disagree without looking wrong
Beyond the three numbers, the routine cross-document failures in a customs file are dull and consistent.
- Net mass against gross mass. Both appear on the packing list, one appears on the declaration, and the wrong one gets carried across. Nothing about either figure looks unusual on its own.
- Package counts that disagree between the packing list and the transport document, usually because pallets and cartons were counted at different stages.
- Currency stated on the invoice differing from the currency assumed in the declared value, which quietly changes the figure by whatever the rate is.
- A consignee on the transport document that is a forwarder rather than the buyer, against a declaration naming the buyer.
- An invoice date after the shipment date on a file where the sequence matters for the value or the origin evidence.
None of these are hard. All of them are checkable by comparing documents against each other, which is exactly the work that gets compressed when a shipment is running late, and exactly the work that gets done by the person who has already read those documents four times.
What we do and do not claim
Customs Clear compares the documents in a file against each other and against the declaration data, and reports where they disagree. That catches transcription and consistency failures, which is a real and common category.
It does not tell you that a commodity code is the correct classification for your product, and it does not determine preferential origin. Both of those are substantive determinations that depend on facts about the goods that are not in any of the documents, and a tool that produced a confident answer to either would be producing a number, not an assessment. Where our output touches those areas it is labelled as an indication to verify, not as a finding, and the reasoning is stated so you can check it.
This article sets out the rules as we understand them and is not legal advice. What governs is the wording of the specific credit, the applicable ICC rules as in force, and the determination of the examining bank or customs authority in the individual case.