It is the first question a sensible owner asks: "I already pay a customs broker. If there were refunds sitting there, wouldn't they have claimed them?" The honest answer is no, probably not, and it is not because your broker is bad at their job.
What a broker is actually hired to do
A customs broker's job is clearance: get today's shipment across the border, correctly classified, accounted for in CARM, and paid, usually under deadline pressure and at a per-shipment fee. They file what they are instructed to file, based on the product information you have given them. It is forward-looking, high-volume work, and the good ones are very good at it.
What refund recovery actually requires
Recovering surtax is a different activity: retrospective audit. Someone has to pull two years of entries, re-examine each surtax-paying line against remission orders such as SOR/2026-34, some of which were published after the goods cleared, assemble evidence, and file corrections, adjustments, and drawback claims. No shipment is waiting on it, no client instructed it, and the per-shipment fee model gives no one room to do it speculatively. It is nobody's emergency, so in most firms it is nobody's job.
The gap is structural, not personal
When a remission order lands weeks after a surtax begins, every entry filed in between paid full freight, correctly, by the instructions of the day. Your broker did exactly what they were engaged to do. The refund exists precisely because the system changed behind the entries. Blaming the broker for not auditing is like blaming your bookkeeper for not re-filing last year's taxes when the law changes; that is a different engagement.
How recovery works with your broker
We audit behind the broker, not against them. The audit runs on read-only CARM data and sampled invoices; it does not interrupt clearance. When claims are filed, they are prepared and transmitted by licensed customs brokers. And the go-forward fix, applying the right special authority codes so future entries stop overpaying, is implemented through your existing broker, who is usually glad of it: their client stops bleeding money and they did not have to build an audit practice to make it happen. The mechanics are on our authority codes page and corrections page.
One deadline binds everyone: refund claims must be made within two years of each importation. Whoever does the auditing, the window does not wait.
Common questions
Should I just ask my broker to audit my past entries?
You can, and some brokerages offer consulting services that do. Ask specifically whether they will re-examine two years of surtax lines against the remission orders, on what timeline, and at what cost. Clearance retainers do not normally include it.
Will a recovery engagement disrupt my broker relationship?
It should not. The audit uses read-only CARM access, filings are prepared and transmitted by licensed customs brokers, and the go-forward correction is implemented with your existing broker.