Use of 'd Test' Did Not Result in Harm in AD Case, Claim Should be Tossed, DOJ Tells Trade Court

Antidumping duty respondents Best Mattresses International Company's and Rose Lion Furniture Company's challenge of the Commerce Department's differential pricing analysis should be tossed since the DPA did not injure the plaintiffs, DOJ said in a March 11 brief at the Court of International Trade. Since the DPA ultimately found that no "masked" dumping was occurring, the use of the analysis, which is based on a statistical test called into question by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last year, did not give Best Mattresses and Rose Lion any standing to challenge it, the U.S. argued (Best Mattresses International Company v. United States, CIT Consol. #21-00281).

The case concerns the AD order on mattresses from Cambodia in which Best Mattresses and Rose Lion served as the two mandatory respondents. The plaintiffs are challenging, among other things, Commerce's use of the DPA to detect masked dumping. In particular, the DPA is employed to find whether Commerce should compare the weighted average of the normal values to the export prices of individual transactions.

In July 2021, however, the Federal Circuit threw the use of this analysis into flux when it said that Commerce did not satisfy certain statistical assumptions required of using the test (see 2107150032). The plaintiffs cited this decision in their motion for judgment.

DOJ, though, argued that this opinion is irrelevant since the DPA was not used to have Commerce rely on the average-to-transaction pricing comparison and that the plaintiffs do not allege that any injury occurred. "Even though the results of the Cohen’s d test indicated a pattern of prices that differ according to customer, time period, or region, with 62.51 percent of the sales, by value, passing the Cohen’s d test, Commerce still applied its standard average-to average-method to all United States sales when calculating the weighted-average dumping margin because it determined that this method could account for such differences," the brief said. "Therefore, the results of the Cohen’s d test did not change Commerce’s calculation of Best Mattresses’ weighted-average dumping margin. Thus, there is no injury that would be redressed by a favorable decision."

The U.S. also argued that the plaintiffs failed to exhaust their administrative remedies on this issue. The plaintiffs failed to bring up the faults of the Cohen's d test to Commerce during the antidumping proceeding, so they should not be able to raise the issue at CIT, the brief said.