International Trade Blog

Ever get in one of those moods where you’re ready to toss every single page from every single stack of paper sitting in a filing cabinet or bookshelf? Me too. But if you’re an exporter, you shouldn’t be too quick to throw away your export documentation.

Although it may seem like a headache to keep all your paperwork, there are quite a few rules regarding export document retention. If you do toss your export paperwork without paying attention to those rules, you could be in for an even bigger headache.

Read More

In my previous blog post, I described how to determine if you need an export license by identifying the reasons for control and checking the Commerce Country Chart. In this article I will describe how to determine if there are any export license exceptions available and how to use these exceptions.

Read More

In late December 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued a final rule removing Hong Kong as a separate destination under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).

While once recognized as an independent export entity, changes to the way the Chinese central government treats Hong Kong have led the U.S. to reclassify Hong Kong for BIS purposes, and it now considers Hong Kong the same as the rest of China. Effective Dec. 23, 2020, this rule increases the likelihood that exports to Hong Kong require an Automated Export System (AES) filing.

Read More

For most human resources professionals, international trade and export compliance are not topics they expected to encounter during their day-to-day jobs. However, at many companies, the partnership between export compliance and HR is crucial. The following summarizes key intersections and how HR may serve a valuable and necessary role in ensuring export compliance company-wide.

Read More

What do you do when you get news that makes you a little nervous? Most of us try to shy away from things we don’t want to be true. Unfortunately, just because we don’t want to deal with them doesn’t make them any less true!

Sometimes, our office gets calls from users who were surprised to discover that names they screened in our export compliance module came back as a match for restricted parties. Their question: What should I do now?!

Read More

In today's global supply chain, it's rare for a product to come entirely from one place. Unless you’re a farmer who’s planting seeds grown in the U.S. and harvested from your own land or a miner who's extracting elements from the earth, it’s likely that your goods contain parts from multiple countries or that you make a part that is one piece of a larger good.

For this reason, it’s crucial that you determine which of your parts and finished goods are subject to U.S. export regulations. These regulations might make it illegal for your products to be shipped to certain individuals and organizations or to certain countries. In other cases, you may be required to obtain an export license before you, or another party, can ship the goods to a certain destination.

Read More

One of the most basic components of export compliance is often one of the most overlooked: antiboycott regulations. These regulations prohibit U.S. companies from acknowledging or complying with requests from foreign entities to boycott Israel and certain other countries.

Not only do these regulations prohibit U.S. companies from complying with these requests, in some circumstances they require companies to report these requests.

Read More

One of my favorite aspects of working with our customers is getting their feedback about the export processes and systems they use and love. However, there are some instances when I hear things that make me cringe.

Read More

In many ways, exporting is like hiring a marketing firm to represent you. With marketing, you have several options: You can do all of your work in-house with your own staff, you can hire freelancers, you can hire an agency, or you can do a combination of all of them.

Exporting works similarly—you can do everything yourself, you can hire vendors like freight forwarders to take care of parts of the process for you, or you can do a combination of both. The goal, of course, is to find resources that can help you do it efficiently.

But there’s something you must remember about both of these partnerships. No matter how you do it, you have to actively manage all the pieces of the process.

Read More

When exporters think about their company’s export compliance—if they think of it at all—they think about it on the back end of the export process. They probably check out the restricted parties lists and, hopefully, find out if a license is needed for shipping their goods.

But this isn’t good enough. To really be efficient and strategic, company staff need to be involved with compliance from the very beginning of the process.

Read More