Trade Compliance
Guides & Insights

Export holds cost mid-market exporters an average of 3–7 days per hold event, plus $2,000–8,000 in direct costs including storage fees, expedited review charges, and air freight to recover the schedule. The documentation that releases holds isn't complicated — but having it organized, accurate, and immediately accessible is the difference between a 48-hour resolution and a two-week nightmare.

BIS processed over 34,000 export license applications in 2025, with 23% returned for incorrect or incomplete classification. The classification determines everything—whether you need a license, which destinations are off-limits, what exceptions might apply. Get the ECCN wrong and you've built your entire export compliance program on sand.

The US Consolidated Screening List at trade.gov costs nothing to access. Descartes Visual Compliance starts at $3,000/year. Both claim to screen against government restricted party lists. The price gap raises an obvious question every CFO eventually asks: what exactly are you paying for?

OFAC settled 22 enforcement actions in the first three quarters of 2025, with penalties ranging from $31,000 to $11.8 million. Same agency, same regulations, wildly different outcomes. The difference isn't random — OFAC follows a penalty calculation framework that weighs specific factors in a specific order.

Manual compliance screening costs $85-$165 per shipment for mid-market exporters. Automated screening drops that to $8-$23. The 4x to 20x cost gap, combined with penalty risk reduction, makes the automation case overwhelming for any company processing over 75-150 monthly shipments.

BIS added 382 entities to the Entity List in 2024. Your screening software flagged zero of them before they were listed — because screening only catches entities already on the list. Due diligence that stops at screening misses the warning signs that would have let you exit the relationship before it became your compliance problem.

BIS revoked Hong Kong's preferential licensing treatment in mid-2020, effective immediately. One Federal Register notice, and a jurisdiction that had operated under favorable License Exception provisions for decades got yanked into the same export control framework as mainland China.

Our team tracked 847 temporary export shipments across our customer base in 2025. Nearly one in five ran into problems on the return leg — not the outbound shipment, the re-import. Demo equipment stuck in German customs for three weeks because someone forgot to file CBP Form 4455 before departure.

OFAC's SDN list contains 12,847 entries with over 47,000 aliases, transliterations, and name variations. Your screening algorithm returns either a match, a potential match, or no match. The problem lives in that middle category—potential matches that could be legitimate customers or sanctioned individuals. No algorithm resolves that ambiguity automatically.