Unfiled drawback claims sit in ports your firm has never worked.

Your firm finds money Customs already owes. The 99-year-old drawback statute, 19 U.S.C. 1313, lets exporters recover duties, taxes, and fees paid on imported merchandise that was later exported or destroyed. Most eligible companies never file. Your work is to identify the gap, document the chain, and file the claim. Your pipeline, if it runs on referrals from brokers and forwarders, has a ceiling. It always does.

The buyers are importers who export, not drawback specialists

The company that needs you does not know the term "duty drawback." They know they paid duty on raw materials, imported components, or finished goods, and they know some of those goods left the country. They do not connect the two events into a refund opportunity.

These buyers are not searching for drawback firms, not comparing vendors, not attending webinars on Customs refund strategy. They find you through accident: a broker mentions it in passing, a competitor's general counsel raises it at an industry dinner, a Big Four team spots it during a broader engagement and brings in a specialist. These accidents produce good clients. They do not produce enough of them.

Why referrals cap out in this vertical

Broker and forwarder referrals have a structural limit. The broker who knows your work has a short list of clients with both import and export volume, and has no incentive to push drawback aggressively, since it does not increase their freight revenue and a failed claim can damage the relationship they value more than yours. The accountant who refers you once may not see another eligible client for two years. Your close rate on referred leads is high. Your volume is low. The math is not mysterious.

Letters that name the trade pattern, not the service

ROI Wire structures Email Correspondence to a named person at a named company, with a subject and opening line that reference the firm's actual trade pattern. A letter that opens with "We help companies recover Customs duties" reads as generic and is deleted. A letter that notes the recipient's HTS chapter, the rough import volume implied by public manifests, and the export filing pattern visible in Census data signals that the writer has done the work of understanding the firm's trade footprint.

The sequence runs short: the first letter asks whether the firm has an active drawback program or has reviewed eligibility in the past thirty-six months; a second, to non-responders, names the specific category that likely applies, same condition, manufacturing substitution, rejected merchandise, or destruction. Each letter is signed by a principal at your firm, with a reply address and phone number that are yours.

Drawback claims require paper: bills of lading, commercial invoices, manufacturing records, export declarations, proof of destruction. The decision to engage a firm is made in a conference room with files on a table, not in an inbox.

Direct Mail respects this: a one-page letter, dense with specifics, the HTS subheading, the estimated annual duty paid, the export years visible in the data, and a single proposed next step, a thirty-minute review of the import and export records. A follow-up piece two weeks later includes a short checklist of the documents required to file, a working document the recipient can hand to operations rather than a brochure.

A phone call, once the letters have earned one

We do not run a phone program for every account. Where one fits, the caller references the letter sent on a specific date and the HTS category named in it, speaking as someone who has already studied the company's trade pattern and is now confirming details the public record cannot show: whether the exported goods were in the same condition, whether manufacturing consumed the imported materials, whether destruction was documented with CBP supervision.

The recipient is not sold. They are asked to verify facts they already possess, and to consider whether those facts, assembled correctly, constitute a claim they did not know they had.

Revenue share fits here, when the structure is right

Some drawback engagements suit a revenue share: the client firm covers the cost of the correspondence program and its infrastructure, and ROI Wire takes a share of the revenue from claims that originate through it, negotiated case by case and never framed as risk-free or guaranteed.

Other engagements run on a retainer, particularly where the client prefers predictable cost or the recovery timeline is extended by CBP processing backlogs. A revenue share only works when the client commits to document production and timely filing; a firm that wants the money without the work is not a client ROI Wire will correspond for.

What ROI Wire does not touch

Drawback claims involve sensitive commercial data: supplier names, pricing, manufacturing yields, export destinations, and destruction certificates. ROI Wire runs the correspondence only. It does not handle claims, file with CBP, access ACE records, or touch the documentation that supports the drawback application. That remains entirely with your firm.

The firms this will not serve

ROI Wire does not take on drawback practices that are new enough to lack filing history with CBP, that promise clients recovery figures they have not substantiated, or that treat drawback as a volume play alongside other refund chasing. A firm that files claims it cannot defend in a CBP audit will eventually harm its clients and itself. Nor does ROI Wire work with firms unwilling to pay fairly for the infrastructure and labor of a sustained correspondence program. The cost is real. The return, when the fit is right, justifies it.

The specifics that make the correspondence credible

A credible drawback letter references the HTS at the six-digit level where the pattern is visible, and notes the distinction between same-condition drawback and manufacturing substitution, since a firm that exports finished goods made from imported raw materials needs a different program than one that exports what it imported unchanged. It acknowledges the three-year lookback and the five-year export window, and that TFTEA, the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, expanded substitution drawback so that some firms eligible under the old rules are newly eligible under the new ones.

It does not lecture. It states the condition and asks whether the firm has reviewed its position. A generic logistics manager at a firm with no import volume will not recognize the terms and will discard the letter. A trade compliance director at a firm with $2 million in annual duty payments and a maquiladora operation will recognize them immediately. That is the intended effect.

A narrow list, on purpose

ROI Wire builds correspondence lists from public and commercial sources that record import and export activity: bill of lading data, Census export filings, Customs manifest records, and broker data where it adds precision, verified for trade volume and pattern and matched to the individuals responsible for compliance or logistics decisions. A thousand firms with import volume but no export activity are excluded.

A hundred firms with export activity but no duty-paid imports are excluded. The remaining firms, typically a few hundred in a given sector or region, receive correspondence calibrated to their specific trade pattern. Drawback is not a mass-market service. It is a precision service for a thin slice of importers, and the correspondence should reflect that.