A customs bond is not a boolean field on a shipment record. Under 19 CFR part 113 the bond amount, the effective date, the document production clock, the extension decision and the charge for a missing document are separate facts with separate actors, and a schema that stores a single in_bond flag cannot answer any of them.

The question this article answers is how to model those facts as rows tied to a shipment and to an obligation, so that each field can be traced back to the section that governs it.

Why the bond flag fails as a data model

19 CFR 113.1 speaks to the situation no statute or regulation covers: the Commissioner may order security, or give that power to the Revenue Division director, or to the port director. A record that says a shipment is covered therefore says nothing about who required the coverage, for which obligation, or at what amount.

Amount is its own field.…