How to choose a customs broker: 9 questions before you sign a power of attorney

The short answer: verify the license against CBP’s public list, get the all-in price in writing, ask who personally handles your entries, and make the broker explain one of your classifications before you sign anything. The nine questions below cover everything those four hide.

Signing a power of attorney hands a broker the authority to file with U.S. Customs in your name. That’s a real amount of trust, and your import record, penalties included, ultimately traces back to you. It’s worth thirty minutes of questions before you sign. Here are the nine that matter most.

1. Are you actually licensed, and can I verify it?

A customs broker license is issued by CBP, and the list is public. A good broker will hand you their filer code and point you to CBP’s broker database so you can confirm it yourself. If someone is vague about licensing, or the license sits under a different entity than the one you’re contracting with, stop there.

2. Who, specifically, will handle my entries?

In this industry, things falling through the gaps cause far more trouble than fraud does: a rotating team, a call center, an account nobody actually knows. Ask for a named point of contact and how you reach them, including outside normal hours when cargo is sitting at the port. “You’ll always talk to the same person” is a feature worth paying for.

3. What happens when that person is out?

The flip side of a small, personal shop is the fair question of coverage. A serious broker has an answer: a documented backup, an escalation path, and software that keeps your filings from living in one person’s inbox. It’s a reasonable thing to ask, and a reasonable thing to expect a real answer to.

4. Can you explain my classification, or do you just assign a code?

The HTS code sets your duty rate, and the wrong one is expensive, in overpaid duty or in penalties. Ask a broker to walk you through how they’d classify one of your products. You’re listening for reasoning, not just a ten-digit number read off a screen. Misclassification rarely shows up right away. When it does, it’s costly.

5. What’s your all-in price, and what’s not included?

Get the number that lands on the invoice, not the quote-bait headline. Ask what’s bundled (entry filing, ISF, HTS lines, PGA filings, the bond) and what bills separately. A common pattern is a low per-entry quote that roughly doubles once surcharges, per-line fees, and handling are added. There’s nothing wrong with paying for value, but you should know the real number before you sign.

6. Do you charge a duty-advance (disbursement) fee?

This one is easy to miss. Many brokers and carriers charge a percentage, often 2–5%, just to advance your duty to CBP. At today’s tariff levels that fee is frequently larger than the brokerage fee itself. Ask whether you can instead pay CBP directly by ACH (you can), which makes the fee disappear entirely.

7. How will I know the status of my shipment?

“Call us and we’ll check” is not a status system. Ask how and when you’ll hear from them: documents received, entry filed, release. Proactive updates you don’t have to chase are the difference between a broker you think about constantly and one you don’t have to.

8. How do you handle compliance and reasonable care?

CBP expects importers to exercise “reasonable care,” and your broker is a big part of how you meet that bar. Ask how they keep documentation clean, how they’d flag a problem before it becomes one, and how they decide who they’re willing to file for. A broker who vets their own book is protecting your record too.

9. If I switch to you, what does that actually look like?

Switching brokers has a reputation for being painful. It shouldn’t be. The honest answer is: a new power of attorney, and roughly a week, with the bond check, direct-to-CBP payment setup, and your first filings run in parallel so nothing stalls at the port. (Your continuous bond belongs to your company, not your broker, so it comes with you.) We wrote the full step-by-step switching guide if you want the play-by-play. If a broker makes switching sound like a quarter-long project, that’s telling.

The quick-reference card

What to check	Good answer	Walk away
License	Filer code offered, verifiable on CBP’s public list	Vague, or licensed under a different entity
Price	All-in number in writing, fees itemized	Low headline rate, “depends” on everything else
Duty advance	You pay CBP directly by ACH, 0% fee	2–5% of your duty bill to move your own money
Contact	A named person, with a backup plan	A queue, a call center, a shared inbox
Classification	Reasoning explained on a real product	A ten-digit code with no explanation
Status	Proactive updates at each milestone	“Call us and we’ll check”

Why this matters more in 2026

Two things changed. First, mistakes got more expensive: tariff layers now stack several deep on many products, so a classification error compounds across every layer, and CBP began voiding importer numbers whose registration data is inaccurate. A broker who verifies rather than copies your details is protecting the number you import under. Second, the supply of brokers is thinning: CBP now requires continuing education for license holders, and some long-time solo brokers are winding down rather than keeping up. If your broker is one of them, choose the successor deliberately instead of inheriting whoever buys the book.

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None of these questions are gotchas. They’re just the things that separate a broker who files from one who’s actually accountable for your imports. If you’ve been meaning to ask your current broker a few of them and haven’t gotten a straight answer, that’s worth a conversation.

Borderless is a licensed U.S. customs broker with a national permit. You can verify our license on CBP’s public database, and our pricing is published on our site, not hidden behind a quote.

Sources & further reading

• CBP: Find a licensed customs broker (public listing)
• CBP: Customs Brokers
• NCBFAA, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America