Mike Smiszek brings more than forty years of diverse trade compliance experience to BCG. He began his career with a major U.S. customs brokerage firm, where he gained experience in practically every aspect of the customs regulations, and where, in anticipation of the implementation of the HTSUS in 1989, Mike led a team tasked with transitioning the firm’s clients’ classification records from the TSUS to the HTSUS. He then moved on to oversee import, export, and anticorruption compliance at several global manufacturers in the defense, telecom, energy, and semiconductor industries. For example, at Lucent Technologies he oversaw export compliance, which included extensive encryption-related issues, for Lucent’s Optical Networking Group (which at the time included Bell Labs). While at Honeywell he led his business unit’s C-TPAT validation, a task that included shepherding a CBP validation team through a number of Honeywell’s foreign facilities. For several years Mike also managed trade compliance in the semiconductor world with Applied Materials and, most recently, as Director of Global Trade Compliance for nearly eight years for MKS Instruments. His extensive experience includes trade compliance audits (both import and export), HTS and ECCN classification, duty drawback, technology control plans, antiboycott, policy and procedure drafting, FTAs, M&A integration, and trade compliance training—and he also has experience with non-U.S. trade compliance rules, particularly with Singapore, Korea, and the EU. Over the years he has conducted in-house compliance training in twenty-four countries (at last count!), and at three companies he taught in-house prep courses for the customs broker exam. While at GE he graduated from GE’s Six Sigma Management Program. And to prove that he truly is a compliance geek, Mike collects nineteenth-century and early twentieth century tariff-related memorabilia.
Mike earned a BS in Management from Lesley College, and has been a Licensed Customs Broker for thirty years. He has written on trade compliance topics, most recently two articles in the Global Trade and Customs Journal. One article was a review of the reasonable care standard twenty-five years after the Customs Modernization Act (Mod Act) and the other was an analysis of the Harmonized System’s General Rule of Interpretation 4.
