Shrimp Association Says CBP Lacking in Some Areas of TFTEA Implementation
Allowing CBP's updated Form 5106 section on company information to be "optional" seems to make for an insufficient implementation measure under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, the Southern Shrimp Alliance said in April 11 comments. "The Southern Shrimp Alliance believes that, in order to be effective, CBP must communicate out to the trade that, while ostensibly optional, an importer’s decision as to whether to provide responses to Section 3 will have a significant impact on the way in which the agency assesses the risk presented by the importer," the group said.
The group said "CBP’s activities to implement Section 115 (Establishment of an Importer Risk Assessment Program) [of TFTEA] should clarify that the information provided in response to the entirety of CBP Form 5106 will be a significant consideration in the agency’s risk assessment program." CBP has been working on updating Form 5106 for several years now and in 2015 said it planned to make some data fields optional after facing some industry pushback (see 1507240009). A CBP official recently reiterated the optional nature of Section 3 (see 1902070042).
The comments were submitted in CBP's docket on modernizing the customs framework. “Our market for shrimp imports has developed around the importer’s mantra of ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’” said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, in an email. “That has been devastating to our industry and it has made American consumers unwitting accomplices in terrible practices throughout the world."
Also troubling is the lack of regulations proposed under Section 116 of TFTEA, the trade group said. The SSA is "concerned that although Section 116 (Customs Broker Identification of Importers) requires the agency to 'prescribe regulations setting forth the minimum standards for customs brokers and importers, including nonresident importers, regarding the identity of the importer that shall apply in connection with the importation of merchandise into the United States,' no such regulations have been released for public review and comment," the group said. "The promulgation of effective regulations to ensure that customs brokers take steps to verify the identities of the importers that they work with should be seen as an essential element of intelligent enforcement."
While the progress under the Enforce and Protect Act within TFTEA is laudable, CBP is yet to adopt "metrics for evaluating the agency’s success in stopping or preventing evasion of" antidumping or countervailing orders, it said. Without such metrics, "CBP makes it significantly more difficult to evaluate the achievements of its enforcement operations," it said. The SSA "also believes that CBP should continue to develop relationships with foreign countries to prevent evasion of U.S. trade remedy laws at home," as described in Section 414 of TFTEA. "CBP should continue its efforts to coordinate with the Department of the Treasury to develop bilateral partnerships that would improve the efficiency of CBP’s efforts to investigate and verify allegations of AD/CVD evasion," it said.