An assist is a mold, a tool, a die, engineering work, design work, or material that the buyer supplies to the foreign producer, free or at a reduced cost, for use in producing the imported merchandise. The classic case is the mold: the buyer pays a tooling shop for a mold, ships it to the factory, and the factory uses it to make the buyer's product. The mold is not on the invoice for the goods, because it was paid for separately, months earlier, in a different budget. It still belongs in the customs value.
The rule is in the additions to transaction value. The price actually paid or payable is the starting point, and the value of any assist is added to it, apportioned across the units the assist produces. A mold that cost $50,000 and produces 50,000 units adds $1 to the value of each unit. A mold that produces 5,000 units adds $10. The math is simple. The documentation is where it falls apart.
The most common wrong answer is depreciation. The buyer looks at the mold on its own books, sees it depreciating over five years, and apportions the depreciated value. CBP has explicitly rejected that approach. In ruling 545031, the agency held that IRS depreciation schedules are not an acceptable basis for apportioning an assist, because depreciation can leave part of the assist's value permanently outside the duty calculation. The mold's value does not shrink because the buyer's accountants wrote it down.
The right basis is the assist's value spread over the units it will produce, or over the units in the shipment where the total production is not known yet. That requires knowing the mold's cost, its expected production run, and the units in the entry, and all three numbers have to be in the file. When CBP rejects transaction value, an undocumented assist is one of the reasons: if an addition cannot be quantified from real information, the whole method can fail, and the entry drops to identical merchandise, then deductive value, then computed value.
Assists hide in the places the entry process never looks. The tooling budget. The engineering services agreement. The free samples of material shipped to the factory for testing. The design files sent to the supplier. Any of those can be an assist if the value was supplied for use in producing the goods, and the test is the supply, not the invoice line.
Build the check into the sourcing process, not the entry process. When a mold is ordered, the purchase order should note the expected production run and the per-unit assist value, and that note should travel with the product file to the broker. Royalties and license fees are the other addition that hides the same way, and the same fix applies: the value that belongs in the entry is decided when the cost is incurred, not when the entry is filed. An assist found after the entry is a prior disclosure. An assist found before it is just a line on the form.
An assist is a mold, tool, engineering work, or material the buyer supplies free or at reduced cost for use in producing the imported goods. Its value is added to the price paid to arrive at customs value.
The assist's value is spread across the units it produces. A $50,000 mold producing 50,000 units adds $1 per unit. The apportionment must be documented with the mold's cost and expected production run.
No. CBP ruled in 545031 that IRS depreciation schedules are not acceptable, because depreciation can leave part of the assist's value permanently outside the duty calculation.
If an addition cannot be quantified from real information, transaction value can fail entirely, and the entry drops down the valuation hierarchy. An assist found after the entry files is a prior disclosure issue.