Exporter Opposes Remand Filing Extension at CIT, Cites 'Egregious' Schedule Mismanagement

The Court of International Trade should not grant the Commerce Department's motion to extend the deadline to file remand results in an antidumping duty case, given the agency's mismanagement of the remand period, exporter SeAH Steel Corporation said in a March 24 brief. If the court does grant Commerce's motion, however, the time should only be extended for two business days plus one business hour -- the same time Commerce gave SeAH to file comments on the agency's remand. SeAH dubbed Commerce's conduct "egregious" and an expression of its "failure to consult in good faith" over the remand schedule (Stupp Corporation, et al. v. United States, CIT #15-00334).

The case concerns the antidumping duty investigation on welded line pipe from South Korea. In July 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit called into question the use of a statistical test in the investigation used to uncover "masked" dumping, remanding the case for further consideration of the test (see 2107150032). The case was then remanded by CIT in October 2021. In response, Commerce asked for 150 days to reopen the record and look at the test.

Commerce then asked SeAH to submit all of the academic publications cited by the Federal Circuit in its decision, which the exporter did, only to be met by Commerce rejecting the submission since it passed copyrighted materials off as proprietary information. SeAH resubmitted the publications, treating the copyrighted bits as public information. SeAH said it then heard nothing from Commerce until it got the agency's draft remand redetermination 109 days after it submitted rebuttal information.

SeAH said that the draft remand results "provided a new statistical analysis of the frequency and proportion of cases affected by application of the Differential Pricing Analysis for all of the determinations it made during calendar-years 2015 and 2021." However, the remand results didn't have any attachments relating to the statistical analysis run by Commerce. The agency gave the parties a week to file comments. SeAH moved for an extension since the attachments were not available to it, arguing that Commerce added new information to the record -- a violation of agency practice. Commerce denied such a charge, rejecting the bid for an extension but providing the attachments.

SeAH again requested an extension to file comments to which Commerce extended the deadline to only six days after the attachments were made available. The exporter responded again, arguing that Commerce's refusal to grant a proper extension was a show of bad faith and pushing for an extension of three business days. The agency gave them two days and an extra hour. Commerce then told SeAH it wanted another seven days to file its remand at CIT to account for SeAH's additional time requests. The exporter told Commerce that it did not consent to the motion since "it was not commensurate with the extraordinarily limited amount of additional time that Commerce had given SeAH for its comments."

The exporter now argues that the extension motion filed by the U.S. is "misleading at best" since it didn't grant any of the plaintiff's extension requests in full. Commerce rejected SeAH's bid for a chance to submit new factual information over the new analysis, the 14-day comment period, the 10-day extension request and the three-day extension. "In light of Commerce’s mismanagement of the already-lengthy period allowed for the remand redetermination, and its failure to consult in good faith with the parties regarding the schedule for the remand proceeding, we respectfully request that the Court deny Defendant’s request to extend the deadline to submit the final remand redetermination," the brief said.