Methodology and coverage

What the product does

Obligora is research and decision support. It normalizes your transactions, imports, and presence facts, evaluates them against versioned rules taken from official sources, and shows you the evidence. It does not make binding legal, tax, customs, broker, or accounting determinations.

This is a research estimate and not a legal, tax, or customs determination. It's a good idea to review the result with your accountant, tax advisor, or other qualified professional before registering, filing, or changing tax treatment.

Rules are temporal and cited

Every registration-threshold rule has a legal effective window and a knowledge-history record. When a jurisdiction changes a threshold, a new rule version is added; the old one is never overwritten, so historical replay uses the rule that applied at the time. Each version cites the issuing authority, document, URL, retrieval date, and quoted text.

Rules pass through an independent verification step against primary sources before they are marked validated. Rules that have not yet passed are labelled pending validation everywhere they appear. Current bundle: 214 rule versions across 69 jurisdictions; 211 validated, 3 pending.

Unknown never becomes false

Facts such as marketplace facilitation, exemption status, or currency conversion may be unknown for a transaction. The engine tracks a known lower bound and a possible upper bound for each threshold. A jurisdiction is reported as crossed only when known facts alone meet the rule; possibly crossed when unknown facts could; and the missing facts are listed so you can supply them.

Projections

Projected crossing dates divide the remaining amount by the trailing 30-day rate of known qualifying activity, with a band from the trailing 90-day rate. No seasonality or growth is modelled. Projections are estimates, not guarantees.

Customs calculations

Duty calculations use exact decimal arithmetic on validated rate expressions from the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Components whose applicability or inputs are unknown make a result partial: a known subtotal is shown, never an invented total. Classification research produces candidates with reasons for and against, decisive missing questions, and cited rulings. It's a good idea to have your customs broker review the classification before acting.

Official sources

• USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule (current release and archive)
• CBP CROSS rulings
• Federal Register API (CBP, USTR, ITC documents)
• European Central Bank euro reference exchange rates
• State departments of revenue and national tax authorities for registration thresholds (cited per rule)

Source freshness is displayed next to affected results as "last checked", never as live access.