Customs Procedures

Where the tool goes wrong, and why it is easy to miss

The declaration would place the bolts under heading 8708, as tractor parts, when the section notes send them to 7318. Note 2 to Section XVII excludes parts of general use, of base metal, from the "parts" of vehicles, and note 2 to Section XV places in that group the articles of heading 7318, where bolts and nuts of iron or steel belong. The tool has answered only the question of use. The declaration system does not reject the code, because it exists and its title says almost word for word what the invoice says, "spare parts for a tractor"; the note does not appear in the title, so anyone who checks only the title will not see it.

The check that catches it

1. Ask the tool, for every code, for the section and chapter notes that support it, and read them in the text of the 2026 Combined Nomenclature of Goods, not in the tool's summary.
2. When the invoice says "part" or "spare part", open note 2 of the section that contains the proposed heading (for vehicles, Section XVII) and the list of parts of general use in note 2 to Section XV.
3. Classify by what the goods are (bolts and nuts of steel, heading 7318), not by the machine they will be fitted to.
4. In the declaration file, keep the code, the notes you read and the reason for the exclusion, so that you can explain the classification at an inspection.

Where the failure pattern is documented: Two studies of HS tariff classification with language models: the HSCodeComp benchmark (arXiv, October 2025) and a study co-authored by officials of the General Administration of Customs of China (arXiv, May 2026).Sources: arXiv, 2025; arXiv, 2026.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.