To facilitate electronic commerce in international trade, paper-based documents in trade procedures have to be replaced by electronic messages. This can be viewed as a business process redesign problem. In this paper we present a formal framework for representing so-called Deontic Deep Structure Models (DDSM) for business procedures. These models can be used to support the electronification of such procedures. The framework is based on a combination of deontic logic and action logic. To illustrate its usefulness we show how the formal framework can be applied to analyze some international trade procedures in which obligations are transferred from one agent to another agent