Trade Misinvoicing

The deliberate falsification of the price, quantity or quality of a good on an invoice submitted to customs authorities in order to move money across an international border outside legitimate channels, whether to evade a customs duty or tax, launder criminal proceeds, circumvent a currency control, or conceal profit in an offshore account, most commonly carried out by under-reporting a good's declared value to reduce the duty owed on import or by over-reporting its value to move additional funds out of a country disguised as a legitimate trade payment. Global Financial Integrity, a research organization that tracks the practice using discrepancies in countries' own reported trade data, has documented trillions of dollars in identified mismatches over a single decade, and the offense is considered especially difficult to detect and prosecute because only a small fraction of shipping containers are physically inspected by customs authorities worldwide.