Best Practices for Managing your new ACH Account and Paying your Duties Directly to CBP

To our Customers who participated (will be participating) in CBP’s ACH program:

As we enter this new period of increased tariffs on imported goods, it is imperative that we inform you of the need to instruct your banks to ensure they will accept increased dollar amount debits for duty. 

It is highly likely that the bank will need to increase the Debit Cap/Debit Blocker for debits from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Company ID. The CBP Company ID was provided by CBP on the initial ACH Debit Acceptance letter.

Whether you have signed up for daily ACH or periodic monthly statement, please contact your bank and ensure that someone within your company’s financial team is monitoring the fund levels.  Additionally, please discuss increasing the debit voucher cap on your account to match the duty amounts that must be paid. 

If CBP is unable to debit your account for the amount due, a debit voucher will be issued with potential removal from the ACH Debit program and result in liquidated damages consequences.  Your surety will be notified by CBP immediately if a debit voucher is issued which may result in increased scrutiny of your financials by the surety and could include collateral requirements for your continuous bond. 

Below are some tips published by the NCBFAA as best practices for managing your new ACH account and paying your duties/taxes directly to CBP:

•     Notify your financial institution to authorize CBP to debit your account.
•     Provide the CBP Customer ID to your bank.
•     Establish an allowable dollar amount for the authorization(s). (Please discuss this with your financial institution to ensure the amount is large enough to cover the Duties, Taxes, and Fees that have been authorized to help ensure CBP debits will not be blocked.)
•     Choose an allowable number of transactions with your bank that can be charged by Customs daily. (PMS customers may have dozens of charges or more during the monthly billing phase, and your bank may have a set transaction count limit.)

To access the schedule for Periodic Monthly Statement dor 2025, please go to this Link.

What’s Next?

Once you become an ACH participant, you will receive a preliminary and final statements from CBP through us. The Statement includes your shipments Entry Number (starts with our filer code AQZ#) which you will find on the 7501 (Entry Summary) and our Flegenheimer billing invoice.

Stay tuned for more tips and best practices on internal control from our team next week!

Thank you,

Flegenheimer Team