| If you’re feeling a bit confused about which countries and what goods will be hit by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, consider the importers that will be on the hook for the bill. With just hours to go before Trump’s promised Friday deadline for a raft of new country-specific tariff rates, customs brokers and trade lawyers across the country are still waiting to see the last-minute fine print on what seems like an impossible number of tariff changes. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump would sign an executive order on the new country-specific rates “at some point this afternoon or later this evening.” It’s still unclear how many orders Trump will need to sign to enact the new duties. Numerous details needed to keep goods flowing and the paper trail compliant remain up in the air: What will dozens of still-unspecified levies be and will they apply to merchandise already in transit? Will Trump’s recent bilateral “deals” with trading partners like the UK and Japan stick? If so, how will they be implemented? “If there is no formal notification before Aug. 1, does that mean the current rates are being assessed? The April 2 tariff rates? We don’t know,” said Cindy Allen, chief executive officer of Trade Force Multiplier LLC, an international trade and customs consulting firm. Official directives are needed for the US to collect revenue from the new country-specific tariff rates Trump announced over the past month in a series of letters and social media posts. Once a decree comes, Customs and Border Protection can reprogram its software platform known as ACE — short for Automated Commercial Environment. That software went from just a few lines in Trump’s first term to getting retooled overnight to handle dozens of tariff codes. If the only update is to various countries’ tariff rate, it could be an easy change. But what Trump has proposed is far more complex than that — a patchwork consisting of new levies for nations and specific ones for certain goods like autos, steel and copper. CBP has had to work out the details on the fly before. “We’re correcting customs every day on scenarios where they mistakenly requesting additional duty,” said William Jansen, head of customs brokerage at SEKO Logistics. “And I can’t blame them. Their job has gotten more complicated too.” — Laura Curtis Key Reading: | 
