9.6 Change Notifications and Broker Employee Reporting (19 CFR 111.28(b), 111.30)

9.6 Change Notifications and Broker Employee Reporting (19 CFR 111.28(b), 111.30)

Two different clocks, two different sections. Changes to the firm — address, name, officers, partners, members — are reported within 10 calendar days under 19 CFR 111.30(a). Changes to the employee roster are reported within 30 calendar days under 19 CFR 111.28(b). Questions in this area are built by swapping the two periods.

The 10-Calendar-Day Notices (19 CFR 111.30(a))

A broker must give CBP written notice within 10 calendar days of:

1. Any change in the business address — relocating a headquarters, opening or closing an operating office;
2. Any change in the organization's name, or in any trade name under which it transacts customs business; and
3. Any change in the officers, partners, or members of the organization — election, appointment, resignation, termination, withdrawal, or death.

The third category is the one that matters most operationally, because the departure of the licensed member or officer who qualifies the organization's license starts a second, much longer clock running in parallel:

Giving the 10-day notice does not extend the 120-day or 180-day clocks, and curing within 120 or 180 days does not excuse a missed 10-day notice. They are independent obligations with independent consequences.

Related Reporting

Two further reporting duties sit alongside these:

• Termination of a broker's employment by a licensed officer or member and similar organizational events must be reported so CBP's record of who qualifies the license stays accurate.
• The triennial status report under 19 CFR 111.30(d), due February 1 of every third year, is the periodic confirmation of the same information. It does not substitute for the 10-day notices; a broker who relocates in year one and waits until the next triennial report to disclose it has violated 111.30(a).

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The Employee List (19 CFR 111.28(b))

The employee reporting obligation is the operational counterpart of the national permit. Because a broker may transact customs business anywhere in the United States without maintaining a local office, CBP's visibility into who is actually doing the work comes from the employee list.

The Accuracy Safe Harbor (19 CFR 111.28(c))

CBP will not hold the broker responsible for the accuracy of any information that is provided to the broker by the employee, absent culpability on the broker's part. A broker that collects and transmits what the employee supplied has met the obligation; it is not an investigator of its own staff's personal data. That safe harbor does not extend to the broker's own conduct — a broker that knows information is false may not transmit it (19 CFR 111.32).

WHY CBP WANTS THE LIST: The employee roster feeds directly into the responsible supervision analysis. The ratio of individually licensed brokers to unlicensed employees is one of the 13 factors, and CBP cannot evaluate that ratio without knowing the denominator.

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How This Feeds Responsible Supervision and Control (19 CFR 111.28(a))

19 CFR 111.28(a) requires every individual broker operating as a sole proprietor, every licensed member of a partnership that is a broker, and every licensed officer of an association or corporation that is a broker to exercise responsible supervision and control over the transaction of the entity's customs business. CBP evaluates compliance against 13 factors:

1. Training provided to broker employees;
2. Issuance of written instructions and guidelines to employees;
3. The volume and type of business conducted by the broker;
4. The reject rate for customs transactions relative to overall volume;
5. The level of access employees have to current editions of the regulations, the HTSUS, and CBP issuances;
6. The availability of individually licensed brokers for consultation with employees;
7. The frequency of supervisory visits to offices that do not have a resident licensed broker;
8. The frequency of audits and reviews by licensed brokers of the customs transactions handled by employees;
9. The extent to which the qualifying broker is involved in the operation of the brokerage;
10. Circumstances indicating a real interest in the operations;
11. The timeliness of processing entries and payment obligations;
12. Communications between CBP and the broker, and the broker's responsiveness; and
13. Communications between the broker and its officers, members, or employees.

Notice how many of them presuppose accurate personnel data: factors 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13 all describe the relationship between licensed and unlicensed staff. A broker with a stale employee list is not merely late on a filing; it has undermined the evidentiary basis on which it would defend a supervision review.

Distributed and Remote Workforces

Since the elimination of district permits and local office requirements, a brokerage may operate with entry writers distributed across many locations and working remotely. That amplifies rather than reduces the supervision obligation. A defensible program documents written standard operating procedures, a schedule of file reviews by a licensed broker, a mechanism for employees to reach a licensed broker for consultation during working hours, current reference materials available to every employee, tracked reject rates, and periodic training — in other words, evidence addressed to the enumerated factors.

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Consequences of Missing a Notice

A failure to give a required notice is a violation of a Part 111 regulation. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1641(d)(2)(A) and 19 CFR 111.91, CBP may assess a monetary penalty not to exceed $30,000 in total for the violation or violations. A petition for relief is filed with the Fines, Penalties, and Forfeitures Officer within 60 calendar days of the notice, and mitigation turns on the familiar factors: whether the lapse was isolated, whether the broker maintains a documented compliance program, whether the broker self-disclosed, and whether the revenue or CBP's oversight was actually harmed.

A pattern of missed notices is materially worse than a single lapse, because it supports a finding that the broker is not exercising responsible supervision and control — which moves the matter from a monetary penalty into the suspension and revocation track of 19 CFR Part 111, Subpart D.