Responsible supervision and control in a small customs brokerage

If you are the only licence holder in a small brokerage, every entry that leaves under your permit is yours, whoever keyed it. The regulation says you must exercise "responsible supervision and control" over that work. It does not say how many entries you have to check, how often, or what you should write down.

This post is for the LCB who knows the rule exists and wants to know what "enough" looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. It covers what the rule says, the factors CBP may weigh that press hardest on a small shop, some approaches to review at different sizes, and the records that show supervision happened. It is a practical reading of the regulation, not legal advice. Where a specific situation is at stake, that is a conversation for a customs attorney.

The rule in plain English

The obligation starts in the statute. 19 U.S.C. 1641(b)(4) says: "A customs broker shall exercise responsible supervision and control over the customs business that it conducts."

The regulation, 19 CFR 111.28, puts that duty on people. 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 must exercise it. The firm must also employ a sufficient number of licensed brokers relative to the complexity of the work, how similar the subordinate tasks are, how physically close the subordinates are, and the skills of both the employees and their managers.

What the phrase means is set out in the definitions at 19 CFR 111.1: the degree of supervision and control "necessary to ensure the proper transaction of the customs business of a broker, including actions necessary to ensure that an employee of a broker provides substantially the same quality of service in handling customs transactions that the broker is required to provide."

That last clause is the useful one. The test is not whether you looked at an entry. It is whether your entry writer's work comes out as good as it would if you had done it yourself, and whether you can show how you make sure of that.

The factors that press hardest on a small shop

Section 111.28(a) lists factors CBP may consider, in its discretion and to the extent they are relevant, when it judges whether a broker has exercised responsible supervision and control. Among them:

the training provided to employees;
the issuance of instructions and guidelines to employees;
the volume and type of business the broker conducts;
the reject rate for the various customs transactions, relative to overall volume;
the level of access employees have to current editions of the CBP regulations, the Harmonized Tariff Schedule and CBP issuances;
the availability of enough individually licensed brokers for necessary consultation with employees;
the frequency of supervisory visits by a licensed broker to any office that has no licensed broker of its own;
the frequency of audits and reviews by an individually licensed broker of the customs transactions handled by employees;
how far the licensed broker who qualifies the permit is involved in running the brokerage and in communications between CBP and the brokerage;
the timeliness of processing entries and paying duty, tax or other amounts owed to the Government;
the broker's responsiveness to communications, direction and notices from CBP.

That is not the whole list, so read the section itself. For a shop with one licence holder, three of the factors do most of the work.

Frequency of review. This is the one every LCB thinks of first, and the regulation deliberately gives no number. There is no required sampling rate. What there is, is the expectation that you review, that the frequency is a choice you can explain, and that it fits the volume and type of business.

Timeliness. This is the factor that pulls against the first. An LCB who insists on reviewing every entry before transmission can become the reason entries go late. In a small shop, the review design has to protect both.

Reject rate and communication with CBP. Both land on one person when there is one licence. A rising reject rate is a supervision signal whether or not anyone has asked about it, and so is a CBP inquiry that sits unanswered while the LCB is buried in review.

The supervision plan

The modernised Part 111 rules were published on 18 October 2022 (87 FR 63267) and took effect on 19 December 2022. They replaced district permits with a single national permit, and under 19 CFR 111.19(b)(8) a national permit application must include a supervision plan describing how responsible supervision and control will be exercised over the customs business conducted under the permit, including compliance with 111.28.

CBP's own summary of the changes says each plan will be unique to the broker and depend on things such as the size of the brokerage, the complexity of its customs business and the types of transactions it handles (CBP, broker modernization). For a practitioner's walk-through of the wider changes, OFW Law has a useful explainer (OFW Law).

If your permit predates the requirement, writing a plan anyway is a cheap exercise. Describe what you actually do today, as if CBP had asked. The gaps show up quickly.

Supervision also has an administrative side that small shops miss. Section 111.28(b) requires the broker to keep CBP's employee list current: new employees reported within 30 calendar days of starting, and terminated employees within 30 calendar days of leaving.

What review can look like, by shop size

The approaches below are ways brokerages organise review, not a compliance standard. The regulation sets the factors; how you meet them is your call, and the right design depends on your clients, lanes and people.

On r/CustomsBroker, licence holders describe both ends of the range: an owner who is the only LCB, working with one experienced entry writer (thread), and a branch LCB responsible for eight to twelve writers at any given time (thread). The same rule applies to both. The practice can't be the same.

One LCB, one or two writers

Review everything before transmission. At this size, full review is realistic, and it is the simplest thing to explain. The risk is timeliness, so set a daily cut-off for work reaching you and treat the pre-transmission checklist as the review script, so that review is the same set of checks every time rather than a read-through.

One LCB, three to six writers

Full review stops scaling here. A common approach is risk-based review: every entry in a defined risk category gets full review, and a sample of the rest gets reviewed after the fact. Typical categories are a new client, a new supplier or manufacturer, a first-time HTS number for that client, PGA-flagged goods, AD/CVD merchandise, values above a threshold the shop sets, and all work from a writer still in training (see training a new entry writer).

A branch with eight or more writers

Here the LCB can't be the first reviewer of anything routine. Senior writers do first-line review, and the LCB reviews exceptions, the risk categories, a sample, and the trends: which errors keep recurring, and with whom. Availability for consultation matters more as the team grows, and once any writers work from an office with no licensed broker, supervisory visits to it become a listed factor in their own right.

A worked example

The following numbers are invented for illustration. A shop with one LCB and four writers files 180 entries in a week. Its risk rules route 40 of them to full review before transmission. It reviews a 10 per cent random sample of the other 140 after transmission, which is 14 entries. That is 54 entries reviewed in the week.

Review finds three corrections. Two are one-offs. The third is a pattern: one writer takes gross weight from the bill of lading when the packing list shows a different figure. The LCB issues a dated written instruction to all writers, adds the check to the review script and reviews that writer's next ten entries in full.

One incident has now produced evidence against four factors: reviews of employees' transactions, written instructions, training, and the reject rate the fix is meant to keep down. None of it took extra work beyond writing it down.

Evidence of supervision

If CBP asks how you supervise, "I check things" is not an answer. The records below are mostly by-products of work you already do, as long as someone writes them down at the time.

A review log. Entry number, writer, reviewer, date, before or after transmission, and what changed. A spreadsheet is enough.
Reject rate, by cause and by writer. It is one of the listed factors, and the causes tell you what to train on next.
Post-summary corrections, with causes. The same logic as rejects, later in the cycle.
Dated written instructions. Every time a pattern turns into a rule, it goes on paper.
Training records for each writer: what they were taught, when, and when their review level changed.
The entry file itself. When a request for information arrives a year later, the file is what shows what was decided and why. See rebuilding the entry file for a CF-28.

Where the broker's exposure sits, and where anyone's does

Two statutes are worth knowing by number, and neither should be read as advice about a particular entry. Section 1641 is specific to brokers: failing to exercise responsible supervision and control breaches 1641(b)(4), and 1641(d)(1)(C) lets CBP pursue a monetary penalty, suspension or revocation where a broker has violated a law enforced by CBP or its regulations. Section 1592 is not specific to brokers. It applies to any person who, by fraud, gross negligence or negligence, enters or introduces merchandise by means of a material false statement or a material omission, and to anyone who aids or abets that. How either applies to a given set of facts is a question for a customs attorney.

What to do this week

Write down your current review practice as though it were your supervision plan. Note where it depends on you remembering.
Define your risk categories, so full review goes where it matters.
Start a review log, even a rough one.
Track rejects and post-summary corrections by cause and by writer.
Check that CBP's employee list for your permit matches who actually works for you.

Supervision is easier to demonstrate when each reviewed field shows where it came from and who changed it, and that record is what EntryWrite keeps for every entry it prepares.