Target's CIT Complaint Merely Attempt to Relitigate Customs Ruling, DOJ Says

Target's complaint filed in the Court of International Trade challenging the court's ability to order the reliquidation of imports past 90 days after their initial liquidation by CBP “masquerades as a motion” for CIT to relitigate this issue, the Department of Justice said in a June 22 motion to dismiss the case. The court's decision in the underlying case, Home Products International Inc. v. United States, already addressed Target's complaint, so the case should be dismissed for failure to state a claim, DOJ said.

Target initially filed its complaint April 23, claiming that CIT's order in Home Products and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision to uphold the order to reliquidate ironing tables from China at a higher 72.29% antidumping duty rate were made illegally (see 2104260048). After a decade of litigation is that case, CIT settled on the 72.29% rate and ordered CBP to liquidate the relevant entries at that rate. However, CBP erroneously liquidated 224 of those entries, including 40 of Target's, at a 9.47% antidumping rate. CBP alerted the court to this error and the court ordered reliquidation in response, even though the 90 day deadline for voluntary reliquidations had passed. Target's appeals of the reliquidation order were denied.

The retailer is now calling for the court to reconsider Home Products, arguing that 19 USC 1501 precludes the court from enforcing its judgment and that the court's decision violates the Federal Circuit's ruling in Cemex, S.A. v. United States. In Cemex, the appellate court dealt with other erroneous liquidations and found that after 90 days, liquidation becomes “final and conclusive upon all persons.”

This decision is not applicable to Target's case, DOJ said, because Cemex involved improper liquidations that differed from those in Home Products and “attacked on a notably protracted timeframe, such that the legal analysis and weighing of the equities in that case led to a different outcome.” Cemex involved a number of procedural deficiencies in CBP's notice to the court of the erroneous liquidations and elsewhere that “are simply not present here,” DOJ said. “The procedural facts and equities present in both cases are readily distinguishable from one another, as this Court in Home Products has already found,” the brief said.

DOJ also said that it has the authority to order reliquidations even after 90 days and that this issue was already litigated in the original Home Products case. “The Home Products Court has already considered and rejected Target’s arguments, concluding that 'the principle of finality codified in [Section] 1514 is not a bar to [the Court] correcting Customs’ errors in liquidating subject entries covered by [a] trade action,'” the brief said. The court's authority to enforce its judgments is “necessarily broad” so that a given judgment can be properly enforced as the circumstances require. That is the case with its power to order reliquidations, DOJ said.

“Because this action attempts to reopen and repeat the now-concluded Home Products litigation, Target should be barred from proceeding any further on res judicata grounds," DOJ said.