Is my U.S. Customs Broker exaggerating?
I've been working with a U.S. Customs Broker lately and they seem pretty good so far. We normally import large machinery into the U.S., so I understand those shipments can involve a lot of rules and documentation.
However, we recently shipped one box of miscellaneous stuff to a new office we're opening in the United States. It contained about 50 company T-shirts, ceramic coffee mugs, some stainless steel nuts, bolts, clamps and shafts, and some adhesive stickers. The T-shirts, mugs and stickers have our company logo on them. The steel items were basically just extra supplies we had lying around our office in Poland.
The entire shipment is only worth around $980 USD.
Our broker is now asking for country of origin and manufacturer information for everything. For the T-shirts, he wants manufacturer details because they're textiles. For the stainless steel items, he's asking for mill certificates and said some of the HTS codes we provided could potentially be subject to antidumping/countervailing duties.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but this seems like a lot for a $980 shipment of random office stuff. I assumed something this small would be pretty straightforward.
Is this actually normal for a U.S. Customs Broker, or is he faking it just to charge me more? I'm not sure if all of this is genuinely required or if we're making a very small shipment way more complicated than it needs to be.
Once last thing. For reference, whenever we moved this sort of stuff with DHL they never asked these kinds of questions.
Any advice is appreciated.