Forced Labor Requirements for Trusted Trader Program Remain Undecided

CHICAGO -- The discussion around including forced labor compliance within Trusted Trader requirements is ongoing after the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee issued recommendations on the subject, said Manuel Garza, director of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism. "Some of them we agreed with, some of them we didn't agree with," he said. "There's probably going to be a couple of new recommendations that COAC is going to provide back to CBP for the next COAC meeting." Garza spoke July 24 at the CBP Trade Symposium.

A forced labor "social compliance program" on the "security side" will take effect along with the new Minimum Security Criteria (see 1905060024) on Jan. 1, 2020, Garza said. That component will only apply to importers, exporters and foreign manufacturers, he said. CBP's CTPAT validators aren't specialists in forced labor so the agency's interest will be mostly limited to the existence and documentation of a compliance program, he said. There's less clarity on the trade compliance side and that won't be in place in the near future, Garza said. "We don't have an implementation plan yet," he said. "It probably won't take effect until -- if I had to guess right now, I would say 2021."

Finding forced labor is often very difficult, said Brian White, director of global compliance, trade and responsible sourcing at The J.M. Smucker Company. Proving to CBP that there was no forced labor involved in an imported product is also tough, as it requires the importer to "prove a negative," he said. CBP's forced labor investigators don't "take these allegations lightly" and "there are companies that are doing their due diligence and it just might not be present at the time," said Alexandra Piotrowski of CBP's Office of Trade forced labor division. "That's why it's not just a one and done when these allegations come in" and "certain stakeholders actually yell at us that we aren't quick enough because we take these seriously because we don't want to disrupt the trade from happening," she said. Jennifer Jahnke, international trade specialist with the forced labor division, said CBP is seeing increased engagement from industry, which is resulting in closer looks at the supply chains.

While civil penalties are among the enforcement actions open to CBP related to importing goods produced by forced labor, the agency has not issued any thus far, Garza said. Asked whether the penalty mitigation benefits for CTPAT members would help in such a case, Garza said that if the forced labor concerns are severe enough to warrant a penalty, that member would most likely be pushed out of CTPAT before the actual penalty is even issued.

The Labor Department's forced labor list continues to be the best resource for looking at particularly risky regions or industries, Jahnke said. "If you identify forced labor, don't think" CBP would prefer that the supplier simply gets cut off, Garza said. "I think what we want you to do is work with them to try and solve the problem," he said. "If they don't want to get any better, then, OK, let us know that you did everything you could." Asked about the broad withhold release order on cotton from Turkmenistan (see 1805210028), Piotrowski said there have been five stopped shipments worth about $20,000.