Highlights
- Section 232 tariffs impose up to 50% duties on steel, aluminum, and copper content in finished goods.
- Compliance now requires component-level material data that most ERP systems cannot easily retrieve.
- Real-time regulatory tracking is essential as tariff changes can apply immediately or retroactively.
Steel, aluminum, and copper aren’t new to global supply chains — but the compliance obligations attached to them are. Section 232 has rewritten the rules for manufacturers and importers of finished goods, extending national security tariff exposure far beyond raw material imports. At rates that can reach 50%, these measures apply to the metallic content woven into products across nearly every industrial sector. For trade teams, the stakes are immediate and quantifiable: shipments cleared without accurate material documentation carry duty exposure that compounds across an entire import program, and the regulatory framework governing these requirements has given no indication of stabilizing. Getting it wrong is not an abstraction. It shows up as assessments, holds, and findings on real shipments at real ports of entry.
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What are Section 232 tariffs?
What are the challenges of Section 232 compliance?
The real-time data challenge: Managing constant change
How Thomson Reuters addresses Section 232 tariff compliance
Practical roadmap: 90-day tariff compliance improvement strategy
Staying ahead of Section 232 tariffs in an uncertain environment
What are Section 232 tariffs?
Section 232 tariffs cover steel, aluminum, and copper imports — with duty rates reaching 50% — making precise compliance a financial imperative for any manufacturer with metallic inputs in their supply chain. These measures represent a fundamental break from how U.S. trade policy has historically operated, moving away from most-favored-nation rate structures toward country-specific tariffs justified on national security grounds.
The law surrounding Section 232 is still being written. Active Federal Circuit proceedings — including recent Supreme Court developments and direct challenges to the procedural mechanisms underlying Section 232 measures — mean that current duty assessments may not reflect what companies ultimately owe. But the courts will not move fast enough to guide day-to-day compliance decisions. Importers who defer documentation until the legal picture clears may find themselves without the records needed to support refund claims or defend their filing positions. Building a complete evidentiary record now, under current U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requirements, is the only way to preserve those options later.
For trade teams, that means managing current obligations while simultaneously tracking litigation outcomes and staying positioned for potential refund processes — a workload that is running in parallel, not in sequence.
What are the challenges of Section 232 compliance?
The data challenge: Beyond traditional tariff classification
Traditional customs compliance was built around two questions: what is this product, and where did it come from? Section 232 introduces a third, more demanding question: what is it made of, and in what proportion? Commercial invoices, bills of lading, and certificates of origin were never designed to answer that.
For manufacturers of complex goods, the information CBP now needs typically lives in engineering drawings, procurement contracts, and supplier specifications — not in the trade compliance systems or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules that customs teams work from day to day. Pulling it together requires procurement, engineering, and compliance to coordinate in ways those functions have rarely had reason to before, and translating it into a format that satisfies CBP’s documentation requirements is a substantial project in its own right.
Where traditional tariff programs require importers to classify a finished product and establish its country of origin, Section 232 demands a granular accounting of steel, aluminum, and copper content at the component level. Most ERP systems were not built to track or retrieve that information, and few organizations can produce it quickly.
The legal complexity: CBP’s expanded data requests
Layered on top of the data challenge is an unresolved legal question about whether CBP has the authority to demand it. The Express Fasteners, Ltd. v. United States case has become the leading test of these limits, and its outcome will matter to any manufacturer currently investing in Section 232 data infrastructure.
The case puts importers in an uncomfortable position. One of its central claims is that CBP has been requiring data that was never approved by the Office of Management and Budget — a procedural objection with real teeth if it holds up. Companies now face a judgment call: build out the infrastructure CBP is asking for, knowing those requirements may ultimately be invalidated, or accept the enforcement exposure that comes with incomplete documentation while the courts work through it. Most cannot afford to wait.
The time-money equation
When manufacturers cannot document the precise metallic composition of imported products, CBP applies duty to the full declared value of the entry rather than to the applicable metallic portion. Across a significant import program, the difference between a fully documented compliance position and an undocumented one translates directly into margin loss on every shipment — not as a hypothetical risk, but as a line item.
Entries flagged for additional review add a separate layer of cost. Goods sitting in customs queues are not moving, and customer delivery commitments do not pause while documentation gaps are resolved. The disruption of clearance holds compounds the direct duty exposure rather than substituting for it.
The real-time data challenge: Managing constant change
Beyond the documentation requirements, the pace of regulatory change is a compliance risk in its own right. Thomson Reuters’ trade content team processed more than 155 million regulatory updates in 2025 alone — rate revisions, country-specific adjustments, exemption changes, and retaliatory schedule modifications across trading partners worldwide. A rate change that takes effect at midnight applies to entries filed that same day, regardless of when the compliance team learned about it.
Tariff changes arrive without predictable cadence. They can take effect immediately or retroactively, often announced by executive order or Federal Register notice with little advance warning. Teams that rely on periodic reviews of static reference documents will consistently be working from yesterday’s rules.
Staying current is only part of the problem. Trade teams also have to answer for what has already been filed. Retroactive audits require reconstructing the exact regulatory conditions in effect on a specific date — not today’s rates, but the precise duty structure that applied when each entry cleared customs. At the same time, forward planning requires modeling the impact of changes that have been announced or signaled but not yet enacted. Few organizations have systems built to handle the historical and prospective dimensions simultaneously, alongside current filing obligations.
That burden multiplies across supply chain relationships. Vendors, intermediaries, and manufacturing partners each carry their own compliance obligations, and the cumulative exposure across a multi-tier supply network is rarely visible from any single vantage point.
How Thomson Reuters addresses Section 232 tariff compliance
Real-time tariff management
Manual compliance workflows were already stretched before the pace of regulatory change accelerated. The volume of updates now — spanning Section 232 rates, country-specific measures, exemption expirations, and retaliatory schedules — cannot be absorbed through periodic reviews of static documents. Teams working from information that is days or weeks out of date are filing on bad numbers without necessarily knowing it.
Integrated global trade management platforms close that gap by tracking regulatory changes as they occur and updating duty calculations automatically. ONESOURCE Global Trade continuously monitors across 220+ countries and territories — backed by a global team of 150+ researchers tracking more than 1,300 sources daily — so manufacturers are always working from current rates and exemption status, not last week’s.
Data management and supply chain visibility
Section 232 compliance requires data that the trade function does not own. Bill-of-materials detail, component-level origin determinations, and supplier-provided material specifications all have to flow into customs workflows from systems that were built for other purposes. Collecting that data is one problem. Keeping it current as products change, suppliers shift, and material compositions evolve is another.
Platforms that connect directly with existing ERP systems while delivering specialized trade content management — including classification tools and the supply chain data capabilities within ONESOURCE Global Trade — give manufacturers a way to reach component-level visibility without rebuilding their technology infrastructure from scratch.
AI-powered compliance assistance
Section 232 compliance is, among other things, a volume problem. Trade professionals bring judgment and expertise that cannot be automated — but the quantity of regulatory text, enforcement precedent, and transaction-level data that a modern compliance program must account for is more than any team can work through manually. The tariff environment of the past two years has made that gap concrete.
AI tools address it by handling the high-volume, pattern-recognition work: flagging relevant regulatory changes, categorizing entries by risk level, identifying classification or origin anomalies across large transaction sets. That frees experienced professionals to focus their attention where it actually matters. ONESOURCE Global Trade’s advanced analytics capabilities extend this further into scenario planning — modeling the duty impact of proposed sourcing changes before decisions are made, so trade teams can bring quantified analysis to sourcing and procurement conversations rather than responding to them after the fact.
Practical roadmap: 90-day tariff compliance improvement strategy
Data consolidation as foundation
Section 232 compliance is only as strong as the underlying product data. Duty calculations, classification decisions, and any future refund submissions all depend on accurate, current bill-of-materials information — and in most organizations, that information is held in fragments across procurement, engineering, logistics, and finance, with no single authoritative source. That has to change before more sophisticated compliance work can happen.
Getting there means establishing clear ownership over the data, defining how it is collected from suppliers, setting validation standards, and mapping how it flows into trade compliance workflows. The effort pays off across several dimensions at once: it supports current filing accuracy, preserves the records that any refund claim will require, and creates the audit trail that CBP examinations demand. Manufacturers who have to reconstruct historical material composition data after the fact find it slow, expensive, and often incomplete. Platforms that integrate with existing ERP environments while maintaining specialized trade content and classification capabilities provide the infrastructure this work requires.
Risk-based prioritization
Most compliance teams cannot address every exposure at once, and trying to do so usually means making limited progress on too many fronts. The more productive approach is identifying which commodity categories, trade lanes, supplier relationships, or classification positions carry the greatest financial or legal exposure if left unaddressed — and going there first.
Transaction-level data analysis answers that question with more precision than judgment alone. It identifies where current documentation is weakest relative to the Section 232 exposure at stake, so remediation effort is directed where it will have the most effect. Risk assessment tools that score entries automatically against Section 232 criteria help compliance teams build toward comprehensive coverage without losing sight of the near-term risks that most urgently need attention.
Staying ahead of Section 232 tariffs in an uncertain environment
Section 232 has raised the floor on what trade compliance requires. The data demands, legal complexity, and volume of regulatory change now attached to steel, aluminum, and copper imports are not symptoms of a turbulent moment that will eventually settle — they reflect a deliberate reorientation of U.S. trade policy that has reshaped what it means to be compliant.
Compliance programs built around periodic classification reviews and manual monitoring were adequate for a different era. What the current environment requires is technology that tracks regulatory change as it happens, data infrastructure that reaches the component level of the supply chain, and analytical capabilities that support both retroactive audit work and forward-looking planning.
Manufacturers who make that investment now — rather than after an audit or an enforcement action prompts it — are better positioned on every dimension: current duty accuracy, refund claim eligibility, and the ability to respond quickly when the next change arrives. ONESOURCE Global Trade brings together the real-time content, supply chain visibility, and AI-assisted analysis that Section 232 compliance now demands.
