How to check whether a quoted landed cost is plausible
A clearing agent sends you a bill. It is a long list of line items, some of which you recognise and some of which you do not. You have no realistic way to audit it in the time available, and the goods are accruing demurrage.
You do not need to audit it. You need to know, in about two minutes, whether the number at the bottom is in the right region or badly wrong. This article sets out the arithmetic for that check.
The one calculation that does most of the work
Every ad-valorem line in the Bangladesh tariff has a published Total Tax Incidence. For the 7,411 lines where it applies, duty and taxes come to the assessable value multiplied by the TTI. Nothing else.
So the reverse check is:
Implied TTI = total duty and taxes ÷ assessable value
Take the duty and tax total from the bill, divide it by the assessable value on the bill of entry, and compare the result with the published TTI for your HS code. If the agent's bill implies 71% and the tariff says 64.25%, something in between those two numbers needs explaining.
This works because the TTI is not an estimate. It is the arithmetic consequence of the six published rates, applied in a fixed order. We verified the cascade against all 7,411 ad-valorem lines in the 2026-2027 tariff and it reproduces the published figure on every one of them:
CD = AV x cd% RD = AV x rd% SD = (AV + CD + RD) x sd% VAT = (AV + CD + RD + SD) x vat% AT = (AV + CD + RD + SD) x at% AIT = AV x ait% TTI = CD + RD + SD + VAT + AT + AIT
Note that the components sit on different bases, which is why the TTI is never the plain sum of the six rates. A line with CD 25, SD 0, VAT 15, AIT 5, RD 5 and AT 7.5 adds to 57.5 but produces a TTI of 64.25% — see 85171300. The full derivation is in Total Tax Incidence explained.
Three plausibility tests, in order
Test one: is the assessable value right?
Before you question the tax, question the base. The assessable value should be CIF plus landing charges. If you bought FOB, freight and insurance must have been added. If the AV on the bill is suspiciously close to your bare invoice figure on an FOB purchase, the AV is understated and a reassessment is coming. If it is far above CIF, a minimum or tariff value may have been applied. See FOB, CIF and CFR.
Test two: does the implied TTI match the published TTI?
Divide and compare. A small difference — a fraction of a percentage point — is rounding. A difference of several points means one of four things: a different HS code was used from the one you expected, an SRO exemption was applied, the line carries a specific rather than ad-valorem duty, or there is an error.
Test three: separate the taxes from the charges.
An agent's bill mixes two quite different things: government duty and tax, which is fixed by the tariff and verifiable, and service charges — agency fee, documentation, transport, port handling, demurrage — which are commercial and negotiable. Only the first group should be tested against the TTI. If the bill does not separate them, ask for it to be re-presented so that it does. That request alone resolves a surprising number of disputes.
When the check will legitimately fail
Four situations produce a mismatch that is not an error.
Specific duties. Fifty-two lines in the tariff are charged by weight or quantity rather than by value — a fixed taka amount per tonne or per unit. On these, no percentage TTI exists at all, and this site shows a dash rather than a figure. Chapter 72 holds twelve of them, chapter 17 five. On a specific-duty line the implied percentage moves with your invoice price, so the reverse check tells you nothing. See specific duty versus ad valorem.
An SRO exemption. Statutory Regulatory Orders grant concessions to particular goods, industries or end uses. If one applies, your actual bill will be below the published TTI, sometimes far below. The published tariff is the default position, not the only possibility.
Bonded warehouse clearance. Export-oriented manufacturers clearing inputs under bond pay a quite different profile. Comparing a bonded clearance against the published TTI is comparing two different regimes.
A genuinely different classification. Customs may have classified the goods under a code other than the one you declared. This is the most important mismatch to identify, because it affects every future shipment of the same product, not just this one.
A worked check
You import wooden office furniture. The bill of entry shows an assessable value of BDT 4,000,000 and total duty and taxes of BDT 4,726,000.
4,726,000 ÷ 4,000,000 = 1.1815, or 118.15%.
Look up 94033000: the published TTI is 118.15%. The bill is correct on the tax. Whatever else you might query, the government's share is not in dispute, and you can turn your attention to the service charges instead.
Now suppose the same AV produced BDT 5,436,400. That implies 135.91% — which is the rate for upholstered seats, not desks. Either the shipment was classified as seating, or the wrong code was keyed. That is a specific, answerable question you can put to your agent in one sentence.
What this check cannot do
It cannot tell you whether the classification is correct in law, whether the declared value will survive scrutiny, or whether an exemption you did not claim was available. Those require the documents and, usually, professional advice.
What it does is narrow the problem. In two minutes you move from "this bill seems high" to "the implied rate is 135.91% and it should be 118.15%, please confirm the HS code used". That is a question a C&F agent can answer immediately, and it is the difference between a conversation and an argument.