The mold you shipped to your factory is part of the customs value, even though you already own it. How assists work, how to value them, and how to keep them from inflating your duty bill.
Customs recognizes four categories of assists: materials and components supplied to the manufacturer, tools, dies, and molds used in production, merchandise consumed in production, and engineering, design, and development work done outside the US. The common thread is value the importer provides that is embodied in the imported goods. A mold shipped to the factory, a CAD file sent to the pattern maker, or fabric supplied for cut-and-sew all qualify.
The category that surprises importers is engineering and design. Work your own team performs, or work you pay a third party to perform, that is used in producing the goods is an assist even though nothing physical crossed a border. Brands that develop patterns, samples, and tech packs in-house and send them to the factory are supplying assists with every style. The value is real even when no invoice exists, which is why this category causes the most inadvertent violations.
The assist is valued at its cost to the importer: what you paid to acquire or produce it. A mold you bought for fifty thousand dollars is a fifty-thousand-dollar assist. Engineering work is valued at its cost, salaries and contractor fees for the time spent on the production-related work. If you acquired the assist from an unrelated seller, the purchase price is the value; if you produced it yourself, the production cost is the value.
Apportionment spreads that value across the goods it helped produce. A mold used for one season's production is apportioned over that season's units; tooling used across multiple styles is apportioned across all of them. The apportionment method must be reasonable and documented: units produced, value of shipments, or another rational basis. Importers get into trouble not from the method but from the absence of one, declaring entries for years with no assist adjustment and no rationale.
The practical approach is an assist schedule maintained per factory and per tooling asset. For each assist, record what it is, what it cost, which products it supports, and the apportionment math. At entry, add the apportioned assist value to the invoice price to reach the dutiable value. The schedule turns a vague obligation into a repeatable calculation the broker can apply every shipment.
Watch for double counting. If the factory's invoice price already includes tooling amortization, adding a separate assist adjustment taxes the same value twice. Clarify with the supplier what the unit price covers before building the schedule. And revisit the apportionment when production volumes change: a mold apportioned over a forecasted million units that only produced two hundred thousand understates the per-unit assist, which means past entries were undervalued. True up the schedule when reality diverges from the forecast.
Assists are a favorite audit target because they are easy to find and hard to have documented. The mold on the factory floor, the tech packs in the design system, the engineering hours in the project tracker: the evidence of the assist exists inside the company whether or not anyone reported it to customs. Auditors know where to look, and the paper trail the company kept for product development becomes the evidence of the undeclared assist.
The fix is a process, not a project. Make assist identification part of product development: when design releases a tech pack or tooling ships to a factory, the customs record updates. Assign ownership, usually to the trade compliance function with inputs from product development and sourcing. The companies that handle assists well barely think about them, because the identification happens at creation, not at audit. The ones that handle them badly discover years of exposure in a single document request.
Yes. The assist rules apply regardless of the relationship between the importer and the manufacturer. Related-party factories add transfer-pricing complexity on top, but the assist obligation itself does not depend on relatedness.
Tax depreciation is irrelevant to customs valuation. The assist is valued at its cost to the importer, apportioned over the goods it produces, regardless of its book value. A fully depreciated mold still carries its original cost for assist purposes.
If the factory genuinely buys and owns the tooling and the cost is reflected in the unit price, there is no separate assist. But relabeling your tooling as the factory's without changing the economics does not work; auditors look at who paid and who benefits, not at the label.