Customs Brokers Ask Canada to Fix ‘Extremely Disruptive’ Help Desk Issue

A disruption involving help desk services for customs business numbers used by Canadian importers and customs brokers is leading to delays and increased storage fees, the Canadian Society of Customs Brokers said in a letter to the government this week. The group urged the Canada Revenue Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency to fix the issue, saying the disruption is causing days worth of delays for routine procedures that previously took minutes.

The society said the country’s revenue agency on May 13 stopped providing help desk support for importers and customs brokers for their import and export business number accounts -- the number that makes up part of the “key” identifier used by Canada’s customs agency to link import and export shipments to the entity responsible for them. The Canada Border Services Agency was supposed to take over responsibility for those numbers through its CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management (CARM) system, a new digital tool to “streamline the process of accounting and paying for goods entering Canada.”

But the society said CBSA delayed implementation of CARM until October “due to the potential for labour action to disrupt” the system’s rollout (see 2404220058). “No contingency plans were put in place,” said the letter, addressed to Canada’s minister of public safety and minister of national revenue and to the president of Canada’s Treasury Board.

Beginning May 13, the group said, customs brokers and their clients “encountered an abrupt and extremely disruptive change to their operations” because the Canada Revenue Agency stopped offering help desk support for traders seeking importer and exporter account suffixes for their business number accounts. That same day, CBSA announced it would begin managing those business numbers “through the submission of PDF forms to a generic email address,” the society said, and new importers who didn’t yet have a 9-digit business number would need to first submit an application to the revenue agency “through a webform process.”

Since then, importers looking to activate an import and export account suffix haven’t been receiving them until “several days” after submitting a request, the letter said. Until that “suffix is in place, import shipments cannot be submitted to the CBSA for release consideration,” the society said, “and importers incur storage fees while they wait to commence the process.”

The society said it was told by one of its members that response times from the Canadian Revenue Agency “have been non-existent,” while other emails have taken more than a day for a response. The member said “this is going to cause additional delays for sure. Previously, a phone call would have solved these issues in minutes.”

Another member noted that importers and customs brokers have to call the Canadian Revenue Agency in order to reactivate a dormant business number, “and the wait time exceeds an hour. Imagine doing this several times a day?” A third member said they have “live freight that is sitting and awaiting this response. Business does not work like this, and we need a resolution to these delays.”

The society said Canadian customs disruptions aren’t new. “Our regulatory and procedural requirements do not always align with those in other countries, and they introduce administrative burden that drives up costs and delays the availability of products for Canadian consumers,” the letter said. It added that Canada is a “small consumer market relative to other nations,” and these issues may cause some importers to “view the potential profits to be made in Canada as not worth the effort.”

“This latest disconnect between CRA and CBSA adds to the list of irritants facing both Canadian and non-resident importers, the bulk of which are based in the United States,” the letter said. The group added that it has “heard” that the CARM was only delayed by the threat of labour disruption, and the new system is ready to be implemented.

“If this is the case, we encourage the CBSA and CRA to explore options to implement the business number and [business account number] support functionality in CARM on an expedited basis,” the letter said, “given the impact its delay is having on daily cross-border operations.”

A spokesperson for CBSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.