§6695B and the New Attestation Liability
Why blind trust in supplier statements is no longer an adequate defense.
The most consequential shift under Notice 2026-15 is the operationalization of Gate 2: Supplier Certifications. Proving your supply chain is clean now requires specific, legally binding attestations from every Tier 1 supplier in your Bill of Materials (BOM).
The Certification Checklist
To satisfy compliance, each supplier certification must include all of the following elements:
- ☐Supplier EINEmployer Identification Number (or foreign equivalent)
- ☐Perjury StatementSigned under penalties of perjury by an authorized officer
- ☐PFE AttestationExplicit confirmation the product wasn't produced by a PFE
Introducing §6695B Penalty Liability
Getting these certifications wrong creates direct liability. §6695B introduces a harsh penalty regime for erroneous claims.
Decern doesn't just collect these documents; we treat supplier uploads as claims to be verified. The certification logic checks the uploaded testament against our deterministic, aggregate public-data disposition. If a supplier swears they are clean but our engine finds a flag, the resulting contradiction highlights a primary review point for §6695B exposure.
The defense mechanism against these penalties relies on a "reasonable cause" standard. Building a defensible §6695B reasonable-cause dossier requires proving you didn't just passively accept a PDF, but affirmatively screened the reality of the supplier's corporate network.
Independent screening platforms, generating immutable run signatures with raw provenance, are your ultimate insurance policy.