Since the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect in 2022, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has ramped up enforcement in both scale and sophistication.

Already, CBP has detained more than 15,000 shipments valued at nearly $4 billion. These detainments haven’t been limited to textiles, as some had expected. CBP has also aggressively targeted electronics, automotive parts, aluminum, and solar components.

Sub-tier connections

What’s made UFLPA compliance so challenging for retailers is the structure of global sourcing. Retail supply chains are vast and deeply interlinked, often spanning hundreds or thousands of suppliers across tiers and continents. Even when companies believe they’ve mapped their supply chains accurately, they’re routinely blindsided by sub-tier connections they didn’t know existed.

Risk under the UFLPA doesn’t typically sit with a direct vendor – it hides two or three levels deeper, through shared facilities, shell subsidiaries or labour transfer programmes that never appear on a bill of lading.

As a result, CBP has applied more pressure on importers to substantiate the full chain of custody for goods, not just at the point of entry. To meet that burden, traditional supplier questionnaires or point-in-time audits no longer suffice. Identifying obscured risks requires complicated entity resolution – disambiguating names and affiliations to surface risks not evident in customs records or supplier declarations.

Thankfully, brands and retailers can leverage third-party intelligence that has already done this work at scale. The global risk analytics provider Kharon, headquartered in Los Angeles, has standardised a process of collecting and analyzing data from obscure sources – Chinese-language corporate records, regional labour transfer contracts, public tenders, shipping data, and more – to expose the indirect links that often go undetected.

In one case, its intelligence flagged a textile facility in Jiangsu Province that, while not on any sanctions list, was shown to share space with a Xinjiang-linked entity and had received workers through a government labour relocation initiative.

These are the kinds of exposures that evaded detection in the past but are now clearly within reach, thanks to third-party intelligence.

Red flags

When embedded directly into sourcing workflows, Kharon’s intelligence can raise red flags before goods are even ordered – preventing problems before they lead to detentions or reputational damage. The same open-source and trade data used by CBP to detain shipments is now accessible to brands, meaning the tools to anticipate enforcement are within reach and not reserved for regulators.

To be effective, however, the intelligence can’t live in spreadsheets or be siloed in legal departments. It must reach the people making supplier decisions, issuing POs, onboarding vendors. And it must be timely, because enforcement patterns shift monthly, even weekly, as new entities are exposed or as geopolitical events trigger new investigations.

TradeBeyond has partnered with Kharon to integrate its forced labor risk assessments directly into the supply chain platform that top brands and retailers are already using to manage their sourcing and supplier relationships.

This means when a supplier has a potential exposure to forced labour, it’s automatically flagged across the network. Sourcing managers see it in their day-to-day dashboards. Compliance officers see the risk scored in context. Stakeholders are alerted not after an order is placed, but before one is even considered.

Reputational cost

In a retail environment where lead times are tightening and margins are narrow, the cost of a surprise detention – both in dollars and brand trust – is staggering. Retailers can no longer afford to operate on assumptions of compliance. The new standard is traceable, documented, and dynamic.

And traceability isn’t just about knowing where goods came from. It’s about proving, with evidence, that every actor in the chain is clean – and being able to demonstrate that fact at any time, under audit or detention. That’s why integrating risk intelligence into supply chain platforms is no longer optional. It’s the only scalable way to manage UFLPA compliance in an enforcement climate that expects importers to show, not tell.

Forced labour is not an abstract policy issue. It’s a human rights violation with real victims. Without transparency, there is no accountability. Technology makes this accountability possible. When intelligence flows across the entire value chain, from sourcing to compliance to production, companies can not only stay ahead of regulation but lead with responsibility. That’s the future of ethical sourcing: It starts with knowing more, sooner.

www.tradebeyond.com