Canadian Customs Broker in the news..

You may have read an article about a Canadian Customs Broker being sentenced to jail after being convicted of evading more than $4.7 million in duties and taxes.

According to the CBSA - "What he did was submit accounting documents claiming a GST exemption code - so no GST was charged even though the goods did not qualify for the exemption," Giolti said. "In addition, rather than account for the goods in the correct currency such as. U. S. dollars, he would claim other currencies so the values would be less.
”However, when he billed the client, he would then bill the right amounts owing: GST and the right currency rate."

This may be unsettling for our customers and I thought I would address our process and systems should you have any questions. There are 2 main things we to do make sure we are compliant -

1) We have a very extensive compliance checking process where we have both the supervisors and managers of our various departments and branches check their people's work for compliance issues. We also have a compliance department that checks the supervisors and managers work for errors or omissions. We are very confident in our people's abilities to catch errors or omissions and a number of our customers have been audited with good outcomes such as this one.

2) We have what we call a "Duty Exception Report" which cross references our customs entries to confirm that what was paid out was billed out. If there is an exception - it goes on this report for our people to check into and fix. It also works in both directions. So, if we paid customs $100.00 in Duty, but we billed our customer $150.00 in Duty - it immediately goes on a report to fix. And, likewise, if we paid customs $150.00 in Duty, and billed our customer $100.00 in Duty - it goes on a report to fix.

I like to keep an open line of communication on this type of issue both for our customers and for our employees.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.