CBP Needs to Improve Its Oversight and Monitoring of Penalty Cases

From our limited testing, we did not identify a systemic issue in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lost revenue due to expired statute of limitations. We reviewed 152 penalty cases, totaling $858.1 million, and determined that 144 (95 percent) were either closed, settled, in litigation, or submitted to the Treasury Offset Program. The statute of limitations no longer applied to these cases. The remaining eight penalty cases, totaling $1.5 million (0.2 percent) had expired and were subsequently closed. However, this does not equate to $1.5 million in lost revenue because CBP is allowed to close cases, for example, when the cost of continuing to pursue the case would exceed the potential amount to be recovered.