By Laura Putnam-Ladley, Compliance Content Manager, Global Trade Intelligence, Descartes
The Advanced Topics in Customs Compliance (ATCC) Conference is a U.S. conference for trade compliance professionals that specializes in advanced level tracks on current trade topics. This year’s event included roughly 550 participants, representing more than 300 companies.
While other national conferences tend to be more focused on networking and current topics at a beginning or novice level, this is the one that “Trade Geeks” come out in full force to attend, learn at more advanced levels, and have higher level discussions with other trade compliance professionals and supporting businesses that come to sell their products and services. Never have I seen a group of professionals so eager to look for solutions to address the increasingly complex regulatory challenges in trade compliance and be willing to openly discuss them during the class sessions and the networking breaks.
After hearing some fascinating presentations and participating in several in-depth discussions, here are the top three takeaways from ATCC 2025 that I would like to share with those who did not have the opportunity to attend.
The Importance of Using the Right Software Tools
There was an increased focus on what tools are available to help Trade Compliance professionals meet due diligence requirements.
Those of us who attended the first track on forced labor “Maturing your Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Program: Standardizing Processes and Proactively Mitigating Risk” were awestruck, listening to Virginia Newman speaking to each of the elements of a forced labor compliance program and the strategy behind meeting the supplier due diligence requirements for each. The main steps included screening, mapping, tracing, and document collection. When prompted by the audience as to what software tools she used to meet U.S Customs and Border Protection (CBP’s) gold standard of forced labor compliance, she had different software tools for each of the main steps:
- Risk assessment
- Supply chain mapping/tracing
- Document collection
Varma and Francesca Guerrero, the speaker noted that CBP has these same tools and capabilities for its enforcement program that are being sold to trade compliance professionals. The software it uses includes Kharon for supply chain mapping and traceability along with the UFLPA entity list from DHS.
It was no surprise that there was quite a line after Virginia Newman’s presentation when she offered a free resource in the form of a due diligence template from Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG). Industry groups like AIAG provide information, tools, and other forms of support for trade compliance professionals facing the complexities of having to put together a robust forced labor compliance program. AIAG is currently speaking with Kharon to provide a discount to its members to purchase its forced labor software offerings.
It’s Not Just U.S. Tariffs That are Increasing
Trade remedies are on the rise in the U.S and so is government enforcement of them.
In the presentation on “Mastering Anti-Dumping/Countervailing Duties (AD/CVD) Compliance Best Practices and Reducing Enforcement Risks: What’s New for 2025?”, Sharon Aranoff predicted that U.S. anti-dumping/counter-vailing orders will continue to increase in 2025. The biggest contributors to this trend are bipartisan trade enforcement consensus and the proliferation of AD/CVD, Section 301 duties, and Section 232 duties on basic inputs such as aluminum and steel. The numbers are staggering and there has been an increase of over 30% in the number of orders between September 2020 and December 2024. The largest number of AD/CVD orders by commodity by far is steel at a total of 306 out of 713 orders. The largest number of AD/CVD orders by country is China at a total of 237 orders out of 589 orders.
Efforts by U.S. importers to avoid having to pay AD/CVD deposits and additional AD/CVD duties on their products by changing where they source their raw materials. Manufactured goods have been countered by domestic companies filing petitions against the new source countries such as Southeast Asia and Mexico. However, they may still be able to find relief through limitations specified in the scope of the AD/CVD order, such as physical dimensions, chemistry, end use, etc., that exclude their products. They can also apply for a scope ruling in cases where it is unclear if their products fall within the scope and there are no relevant scope rulings that can be applied.
CBP is highly incentivized to increase their enforcement efforts due to the $5.4 billion in unpaid AD/CVD bills from FY1993 through FY2020. Since 2016, CBP has launched more than 300 investigations under the Enforce and Protect Act of 2015 (“EAPA”). It has conducted more than 45 distinct foreign on-site visits or verifications and identified over $1 billion in AD/CVD duties owed to the U.S. Government. During calendar years 2023 and 2024, CBP initiated 34 investigations and made 31 evasion determinations. Products investigated for evasion include mattresses, mobile access equipment, xanthan gum, quartz surface products, aluminum extrusions, thermal paper, steel grating, and cast-iron soil piping.
Forced Labor is a Higher Priority Than Ever Before
Compliance with forced labor requirements is quickly moving up the list of priorities for trade compliance professionals after significant regulatory developments came out for it late last year.
The ATCC 2025 conference had five tracks on forced labor and one that included EU forced labor as part of a presentation. To date, this is the most I have seen at a national trade compliance conference and is an indicator of its increased importance in trade compliance. Although there was a lot of industry buzz around the new Trump Administration’s agenda and potential impacts on tariffs and de minimis duty exemptions, there was only one track on it. The rest of the tracks only provided known information and avoided discussing the recent regulatory changes as they were subject to change. Tariff remedies were the focus of two tracks and were topics of other presentations that addressed duty mitigation and country of origin determination.
Anne Van de Heetkamp and Jackson Wood shared survey results from the “2024 Descartes Trade Compliance & Supply Chain Intelligence Research Study” on the top three challenges organizations face in international trade operations during the “Exploring the Next Generation of Trade Content” presentation. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance, which includes forced labor, placed second on this list. Forced labor compliance itself was ranked as seventh. It was pointed out by several attendees that, since the survey was carried out, compliance with the UFLPA has increased in terms of priorities for organizations. This has emerged through the increased enforcement of the UFLPA, including the recent 150 additions to the UFLPA list, as well as forced labor taking center stage as a key issue for the tariff rate hikes under the Trump Administration.
Aside from the software tools that are currently available for forced labor compliance and other key areas of import compliance, trade compliance professionals are also looking for AI solutions to reduce the amount of work involved in following global import regulations and to provide required data in a timelier manner to make critical business decisions on their global shipments. Presently, AI developments have resulted in a chatbot to answer trade compliance-related questions. The effectiveness of the AI chatbot depends upon the data that it can use to perform searches. AI queries can break if unrelated data sources are included. As such, only rigid databases should be used. Todd Smith from KYG pointed out during his presentation “Artificial Intelligence for Trade Compliance Debate” that his AI chatbot only uses the high-quality trade content data provided by Descartes for AI-assisted classification such as section notes, chapter notes, explanatory notes, CROSS rulings, informed compliance publications, and CIT cases.
How Descartes Can Help
Descartes CustomsInfo Reference features an expansive database of more than 6 million reference documents, including cross-referenced and searchable duty rates. The solution can be used to explore daily Federal Register (FR) publications from 1998 to the current day by Harmonized System (HS) code and to keep up to date with AD/CVD investigations by checking the latest Federal Register.
The AD/CVD Lookup tool will search for the rates for any 10-digit HS Code. Search results for an HS Code query show a link to the rates, case numbers, related case numbers, a short description, the affected country’s two letter ISO code, effective date, date added, and inactive date. Clicking on one of the “Rates” links pulls up a list of extended case numbers with the names of manufacturers, exporters, and their corresponding AD/CV Duty rates.
Descartes is a provider of an industry-leading suite of denied party screening, global trade management content, 3rd party risk management solutions, as well as sanctions screening content for leading business systems.
Descartes Visual Compliance and Descartes MK solutions are flexible and modular, allowing organizations to pick the specific and exact functionality and content they need for their particular compliance needs and scale up later as and when necessary.
To meet evolving compliance requirements, Descartes adds new entities to its screening lists as soon as government and other official sources update theirs. List content related to international sanctions programs is updated within our application on an ongoing basis, and any additions will be made promptly to help keep our customers in compliance with sanctions and embargo programs—including options to help address requirements related to forced labor, sanctioned ownership, military end use, and other emerging regulations.
If you would like to take a closer look at our tariff lookup or sanctions screening technology, you can simply contact us or request a demo. Find out what our customers are saying about Descartes Denied Party Screening on G2 – an online third-party business software review platform.
