Trade Compliance
Guides & Insights

BIS conducted 1,247 end-use checks and compliance assessments in FY2024. In 68% of cases resulting in warning letters, the agency cited inadequate training documentation as a contributing factor. Not absence of training — inability to prove training happened.

A single OFAC SDN entry can contain 15-20 aliases, transliterations, and spelling variations. When your screening system flags a match, proper hit investigation takes 23 minutes on average. Rushed investigations take 4 minutes. Guess which version shows up in enforcement case files.

Your freight forwarder shipped to a sanctioned entity. Your 3PL consolidated cargo with goods bound for an embargoed destination. Your customs broker filed an incorrect ECCN. The violation happened in your partner's warehouse, on your partner's truck, processed by your partner's staff. And now you're the one holding the enforcement letter.

Your customs broker just emailed about an ECCN classification conflict with the freight forwarder's HTS determination. Legal wants to know if the end-user triggers EAR99 or needs a BIS license review. And someone in accounting keeps confusing OFAC with OFCCP. Again.

OFAC's maximum civil penalty hit $377,700 per violation in January 2025. BIS bumped its ECRA penalty cap to $374,474 the same month. The questions compliance teams ask haven't changed much over the years. They've just gotten a lot more expensive to answer wrong.