Agency Check

Zonos Agency Check evaluates each item individually to determine whether it is subject to a Partner Government Agency requirement and, if so, what is needed to clear customs. regulationsApply is fully built for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)—whose electronic filing of Certificates of Compliance becomes mandatory on July 8, 2026—and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For products that can legally enter a country, Agency Check answers a different question than Restrict: it tells you whether an agency requires additional data, external certification, or documentation to clear—or whether the item qualifies for a disclaim. Agency Check is available standalone via the regulationsApply mutation, or as the regulationCheck within Zonos Greenlight.

How it works 

Agency Check runs every item through a decision at the moment it enters the clearance workflow:

1. HS-level applicability — Determines whether the item's HS code falls under an agency's oversight (for CPSC, the ~580 HS codes on the eFiling list).
2. Product-level resolution — Uses AI classification of the item's name, description, materials, and intended audience to resolve which specific regulations apply and what certificate type is required. For CPSC, the result includes the citations that apply to the item, along with the required labels, the tests needed to demonstrate compliance, and accredited labs that can perform those tests.
3. Disclaim — When an item is not actually subject to the agency's requirements, returns a disclaim instead of a certificate requirement, so compliant items keep moving.

The required inputs are the ship-from and ship-to countries and at least one item. Each item needs a name; providing an htsCode, description, material, categories, and attributes improves the accuracy and confidence of the result. If an item's HS code is omitted or invalid, it is classified automatically.

Check a shipment for agency requirements 

Use the regulationsApply mutation to check one or more items. The agencies input controls which agencies to evaluate (defaults to [CPSC]). The response returns one applied-regulations entry per item; each implements the AppliedRegulations interface, so use an inline fragment (... on AppliedRegulationsCPSC) to select agency-specific fields.

If an item is not subject to the agency, certificateType is null and a disclaim is returned instead.

Checking multiple agencies 

The agencies input accepts more than one agency. Each item is evaluated against every requested agency and returns a separate applied-regulations entry per agency, distinguished by the agency field. CPSC results implement AppliedRegulationsCPSC; FDA results implement AppliedRegulationsFDA, which exposes FDA-specific fields such as affirmationsOfCompliance, productCode, processingCode, and intendedUse. Select the fields you need with an inline fragment for each type.

For FDA items, you can pass a known 7-character productCode under fda on the item input to skip AI product-code classification, and set intendedUse to influence which affirmations apply.

CPSC and FDA are both fully supported today. The same infrastructure—HS-level applicability, product-level resolution, and per-item disclaim—is designed to extend to additional Partner Government Agencies.

Getting started 

Agency Check requires a subscription and is available standalone or within Zonos Greenlight. For teams already using Zonos's pre-clearance products, it's a schema-level upgrade. A CSV/bulk workflow is also available for teams without an API integration. To learn more about access, pricing, and integration, contact sales.