If you think your company can smuggle and fly under the radar screen, think again.

When your company touches imports, customs, or tariffs, you need to know this.

The Justice Department stood up a dedicated trade fraud task force in August of last year. Its first settlement came three months later.

This past May, it delivered the largest customs-related False Claims Act recovery ever: $550 million from aluminum companies and their warehouses.

A week later, two steel companies paid $19 million for misrepresenting Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Turkish, and Vietnamese steel as Canadian or American-made.

Underpaying customs duties you legitimately owe is a reverse false claim, meaning it’s a False Claims Act case with triple damages and whistleblowers ready to report you.

As tariffs climb, so does the incentive to misdeclare country of origin, and DOJ now has a dedicated task force and a whistleblower bar ready and good at spotting those situations.

If trade compliance isn’t in your risk assessment right now, fix that immediately.

The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.