Compliance Audits

A full audit and risk assessment of your current customs/VAT, logistics, documentary and procedure compliance.

Your compliance audit will need to include a director, a member from finance, your export/import admin teams and anyone you feel would be able to contribute or have a vested interest to be involved.

The compliance audit will be conducted by Nick Patrick, Head of the Sheffield International Trade Centre. Our customs consultant will either be present at the audit or will be consulted if required.   

The audit is primarily a discussion with all the relevant personnel present, to ask specific questions such as ‘take us through a typical EU import, export and the same for non-EU activity’.  We would need to see some historic document archives for EU trade (pre-Brexit) and the rest of the world trade. 

By doing it in this way we get a good insight into the company activities and enables us to: 

• Assess your colleague’s knowledge about what they are doing and why. 
• Identify shortfalls in your practices and enables us to plug the gaps from a compliance perspective. 
• Opens discussions about other customs systems we could implement to your activity type, such as IPR/OPR, Customs Warehousing, Trusted trader suitability, CFSP etc. 
• Look at HMRC compliance systems that will have to be implemented such as EIDR and import/export in-house records, CFSP etc. 
• Explain the 3-phase introduction for customs procedures and the authorisations you will need to have in place and the critical timings for completing customs procedures. 
• We will discuss your UK and EU VAT responsibilities and liabilities. 
• We will consider how departing from the EU single market and the customs union has affected the relationship with your European customers and suppliers.  What sort of a dialogue should you have with them to ensure continuity of your business with minimum collateral damage?  If developing business in the EU or the rest of the world, we can set you on the right footing from the start. 
• We will consider how our changed relationship with Europe has affected your company and offer mitigating systems including the longer term of trusted trader which considers how your company is set up for full global customs digital control and advanced cargo reporting. 
• We can look at all aspects of your future business development including an introduction to our Global Business Network whereby we have people on the ground, ready to act as your interim agents in over 70 markets 
• Above all we will highlight your legal responsibilities as an exporting /importing company and the consequences of non-compliance. 

We will need to see physical evidence of your EU and non-EU documents and will ask for about 3 document sets for each import / export. 

We will write and present the reports within a few days which will include a compliance risk assessment on your current practices which mirror the HMRC risk register, a corrective report and gap analysis which will also include suggestion for additional systems to be considered. 

If the audit is online, anyone you feel should be involved can be invited to a zoom meeting. This can include personnel from subsidiary companies in the UK or overseas if applicable. 

Please contact us for more details on costs and audit availability. Call 02476654321 or email [email protected].