Customs (Finalisation of Provisional Assessment) Regulations, 2025

What it does

Customs may assess duty provisionally where the importer or exporter has not produced the documents or information needed, or where the officer wants to make further enquiry or a test. The duty paid then is provisional, and the importer carries a bond, security and interest until the assessment is finalised. The Regulations set out the steps and the time limits by which that must happen.

They divide the period into stages. Within fifteen days of a provisional assessment made for want of documents, the proper officer must tell the importer or exporter in writing exactly what is to be produced. The importer then has two months, extendable by up to two months at a time, but not beyond fourteen months from the date of the provisional assessment. Where the assessment was provisional because of an enquiry, the enquiry report must reach the proper officer within fourteen months. After the documents arrive or the enquiry ends, the officer has three months to finalise, with further periods of two months at a time allowed by a superior officer, always inside the outer limit set by the Act.

Where the final assessment departs from the provisional one, the officer must pass a speaking order after following natural justice. Where it confirms the provisional assessment, the officer records the importer's acceptance and informs it in writing of the date of finalisation.

Who it binds

The proper officer of customs, who is the person the time limits are addressed to, and the importer or exporter, whose obligations in the Regulations are to produce what is asked for within the time allowed. The two year limit itself is addressed to the officer. The Regulations place no new liability on the importer beyond the duty to produce and to confirm in writing that everything has been produced.

Each bill of entry or shipping bill assessed provisionally is treated as a separate case, so an importer with many provisionally assessed bills has a separate clock running on each.

What has changed, and when

The Finance Act, 2025 inserted two sub-sections into section 18 of the Customs Act, 1962 from 29 March 2025. A provisional assessment must now be finalised within two years, extendable once by one year by the Principal Commissioner or Commissioner for reasons recorded in writing, and the sub-sections list the reasons that stop the clock.

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs issued these Regulations as Notification No. 55/2025-Customs (N.T.) on 12 September 2025, in force on publication. They supersede the Regulations of 2018. For a provisional assessment pending on 29 March 2025, the Regulations count their stage periods from that date, and the Board's circular of 12 September 2025 works out that fourteen months from that date ended on 29 May 2026.

What turns on it in practice

The practical effect is a fixed date for the oldest files. Every provisional assessment pending on 29 March 2025 has its two years counted from that day, so the oldest of them must be finalised by 29 March 2027, subject to the one year extension and to the grounds that stop the clock. The site's note on the point, in the trade area, sets this out.

For an importer under a special valuation enquiry, or waiting on a test report for a recurring product, the Regulations decide what to do before that date. The first task is to list every provisionally assessed bill with its own date. The second is to confirm in writing, as the Regulations require, that every document asked for has been produced, so that the officer cannot finalise on the record and say the importer failed to respond. The third is to watch the Board's internal control, under which a file pending more than seventeen months is reported to the Commissioner.

The same facts carry a cost for the importer while the file is open: the bond and security stay in place and interest keeps running. A client with a large number of open files should have the dates checked against the original assessment orders, because the date that matters is the date of each assessment and not of the bill alone.