How can we automatically process rebate claims from overpaid cross-border duties?

Client Background

The client, as one of the world’s largest bearing manufacturers, imports products from countries across the world. As required by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), the company must pay duty on the goods at the time of import; however, many of the products were eligible for duty remission which resulted in reimbursement from the CBSA.

The preparation of the Duty Remission claim began by collecting a full year of the customer invoices (approximately 48,000) as well as all invoices by suppliers. Each customer invoice claim would then be cross-referenced and matched to a supplier’s invoice. If it was found that the product listed in the claim was eligible for rebate, then, line-by-line, the claims were hand-written in a B2 customs document where the claim value was totaled. Two copies of this form were made (to prevent lost information if something were to happen to the original).

Then, it was required to submit to CBSA documentation for all companies that were included in these claims to verify that they met the requirement for duty remission (copies were made of this documentation as well). Once submitted, the CBSA compared the B2 claims to the supplier invoices submitted separately by the company. If the B2 claim matched perfectly and was eligible for duty recovery, the CBSA sent a document called a DAS which was then matched with the claim and moved to a new file awaiting payment.

Key Challenges

The process of filling out the B2 customs claim created multiple challenges for the client. The first of which was inefficient use of resources: the annually-prepared document was approximately 5,000 pages in length and as a result required extensive staff time to manually complete. If the client included all eligible claims on the B2 form, it would take between 18 to 24 months to file 12 months worth of claims. Consequently, the client would fall so far behind that they were obligated to periodically skip an entire claim year, with a potential cost of hundreds of thousands. In an attempt to become more efficient, the client elected to only file claims on goods over the value of $150, resulting in lost revenue.