CBP Origin Audit: What to Prepare Before the Request for Information Lands

The legal question behind an origin audit is whether the work done in the last country amounts to a substantial transformation. Under 19 C.F.R. § 134.1(b), operations performed or materials added in another country must reach that threshold before the country becomes the country of origin — which is to say, the goods must become a new and different article, not the same article in a new box.

Two qualifications belong in your file, because overstating the rule is its own risk. That definition applies within the meaning of its own part, and Part 134 is the marking regime; for duty purposes the standard CBP applies comes from case law, and goods claiming preference under the North American agreement are determined under a separate set of rules. None of that changes what you are asked to produce: records of what entered the factory, what happened there, and what left. If you are checking a claim before shipment rather than after a request arrives, how to verify a country of origin claim is the same evidence assembled earlier and cheaper.

Compliance folders usually get organised by vendor, because that is how purchasing thinks. A request for information is organised by entry: a subheading, a date, a quantity, a value. Rebuilding by entry line late, under a deadline, is where most of the pain lives, so it is worth doing once while nobody is asking.

For each line, the file wants four things that connect: the finished good and its subheading; the bill of materials with the country of origin of each input and the purchase document that proves it; the production records for the specific lots that shipped, with dates that fall before the export date; and the identity of the physical plant, not just the trading company on the invoice. When a trading company sits between you and the factory, that gap is the first place the chain breaks — and it is exactly where the supplier audit red flags worth stopping an order over show up months earlier, if anyone is looking.

For roughly six months there was an explicit penalty duty attached to origin evasion. Executive Order 14326 imposed an additional 40% ad valorem on goods that CBP determined had been transshipped to evade the order's Section 2 duties, applying to entries from August 7, 2025. Two details in that text were widely misread: the 40% stood in lieu of the origin country's reciprocal rate rather than stacking on top of it, while remaining alongside penalties under 19 U.S.C. 1592 and other duties owed; and the order barred CBP from allowing mitigation or remission of it.

That duty is no longer collected. The Supreme Court held on February 20, 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, consolidated with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, No. 25-250, that the emergency economic powers statute does not authorise the President to impose tariffs. Executive Order 14389 then terminated the ad valorem duties imposed under it, and according to CBP's own messaging the corresponding tariff codes went inactive in its entry system from February 24, 2026. Vietnam's 20% reciprocal rate under subheading 9903.02.69 ended on the same date; the earlier 46% under 9903.01.72 had already been superseded on August 7, 2025, so any file still citing it is two revisions behind.

Here is the trap that catches careful people. Subheading 9903.02.01, the transshipment provision, is still printed in the current revision of the tariff schedule with a rate of the applicable subheading rate plus 40%, and unlike 9903.01.72 it carries no provision terminated annotation. Anyone looking the code up today reads a number that is not being collected. Two further points of precision worth keeping in the file: the heading is country-neutral on its face, covering articles the product of any country rather than naming Vietnam; and the current Section 301 structure contains no transshipment or origin-evasion penalty heading at all — that device disappeared with the regime that created it and was not reproduced.

The country-specific add-on today comes from Section 301 rather than emergency powers: an additional 12.5% on products of Vietnam under subheading 9903.05.84, effective July 24, 2026, with in-transit goods exempted for a short window afterwards. It sits on top of the normal rate for the subheading rather than replacing it, which is why there is no single blended number for Vietnamese goods — the total depends on the subheading's own rate, and that varies by product.

Two adjacent facts belong on the same page of your file. Goods already subject to Section 232 duties on steel, aluminium and copper or on vehicles and parts are carved out of the 12.5% under subheading 9903.05.90 rather than paying both. And there was an interim step between the two regimes worth knowing if your entries fall in that gap: a 10% surcharge on all countries under Section 122, subheading 9903.03.01, which expired at the end of July 23, 2026 under that statute's 150-day limit, one day before the Section 301 action started.

The discipline this asks for is not tariff expertise, it is version control: record which rate you applied, under which authority, on which date, with the source you read it in. That is a familiar habit in a different domain — it is the same reason a brand that loses access to a channel discovers what it does and does not own when a platform rewrites its rules. Rules that move under you are survivable when your own record of what you relied on is intact.

The most useful document in the file is one nobody asks for by name: a single page stating which operation you rely on as the substantial transformation, which rule you are applying, and which records evidence it. Writing it forces the weak links into the open while there is still time to fix them, and it stops the answer from becoming an improvisation delivered under deadline by whoever happens to own the relationship.

It also protects against the most common bad answer, which is to hand over a certificate of origin and stop. A certificate summarises someone else's determination; it is not proof of the operations behind it. If the certificate is all that exists, the honest internal conclusion is that the origin position has not been tested yet.

The identical evidence answers a second authority. Vietnam's customs penalty framework is now Decree 169/2026/NĐ-CP, in force from July 1, 2026, and its Article 18 penalises falsely claimed Vietnamese origin across export, import, temporary import for re-export, transit and transhipment, with fines banded by the value of the goods plus confiscation and forced destruction or recovery of an equivalent amount.

So the file is not a US compliance artefact that a supplier tolerates as a favour. It is the same file that protects the factory, and it is a reasonable thing to require in the purchase contract on that basis — with a copy on your side, because a file that only exists at a supplier you may stop buying from is a file you do not have.