Census, BIS Officials Met to Work Out Remaining Issues in Upcoming Routed Export Rule

Officials from the Commerce Department's Census Bureau and Bureau of Industry and Security met March 9 to align their long-awaited proposed rules on routed export transactions (see 1907100053), which will feature “intense changes” and be accompanied by a series of training sessions and webinars, said Kiesha Downs, chief of the Census Bureau Foreign Trade Division’s regulations branch. Officials, including BIS Acting Undersecretary Cordell Hull, met to try to “flesh out” some remaining issues before publishing the proposals, which must be issued simultaneously because of the significant overlap within the rule between BIS and Census, Downs said.

Downs said she hopes to receive either a “thumbs up or thumbs down” from BIS within the next week before the rule can be sent to Commerce’s Office of the General Counsel and then to the Federal Register for official notification and solicitation of public comment. “That’s why yesterday’s conversation occurred,” Downs said during a March 10 Regulations and Procedures Technical Advisory Committee meeting. “We’re hoping that will kind of get everything straight so we can publish.” Downs said industry will be given a 60-day comment period once it is published.

Downs said the proposed rule will make “a lot of changes,” and urged that there be substantial public comments, which she said will help inform the final rule. The rule is expected to tackle the process around assigning filing responsibilities to forwarders -- which will help Census collect more accurate export statistics -- and address information sharing among parties in routed export transactions (see 1904170064). “We hoped we came up with two sets of regulations that accomplished our goal,” Downs said.

She added that Census and BIS have already planned for industry training and free webinars once the rules are issued. “Typically we have over a thousand people that will log on to our webinars, so we feel like we’ll get good traffic,” Downs said. “There are a lot of changes so we definitely want you guys to dig into it and tear it apart and let us know what your thoughts are.” She also said Census wants to meet with trade associations and other groups to discuss comments or regulations that may be misunderstood in writing. “Sometimes we write something in the regulations and you craft a response to us and there’s still a disconnect between what each party is saying,” Downs said. “It’s good to talk through some of these comments and we’re definitely open to that.”

Hillary Hess, BIS’s director of regulatory policy, said during the meeting that the proposed rules have not “been going as quickly as I think we would have wanted it internally.” Downs suggested there may be substantial progress by the next RPTAC meeting in June. “I’m hoping next RPTAC that I can tell you our rules are moving,” she said.