How to choose a customs broker: 9 questions before you sign a power of attorney
A vendor-neutral checklist for picking a customs broker, from license verification to how they handle classification, fees, and being reachable when it matters.
By Joy Xue
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?
The most common failure in this industry isn’t fraud, it’s things falling through the gaps: a rotating team, a call center, nobody who actually knows your account. 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 transfer, direct-to-CBP payment setup, and your first filings run in parallel so nothing stalls at the port. If a broker makes switching sound like a quarter-long project, that’s telling.
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
Written by Joy Xue
A University of Michigan data-science graduate and licensed U.S. customs broker, and the founder of Borderless (CBP filer code NQR). Verify our license · About Borderless