'High Priority' to Add Companies to UFLPA List

The head of the interagency Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force said one of the group's highest priorities this year is to add additional companies to the entity list of firms and organizations that either produce goods made with forced labor or are involved in the recruiting or transfer of minority workers out of Xinjiang to other parts of China.

DHS Under Secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans Robert Silvers spoke with Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Nury Turkel March 17 about compliance with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Silvers said the government is continuing to develop leads to investigate, and then bringing enforcement actions "to clamp down on those kinds of goods coming into this country."

One of the sources of investigative leads that DHS values are reports from nongovernmental organizations. "We literally can't do it without them," Silvers said, and said that enforcement actions have followed NGO investigative leads already.

He said the government understands it's difficult to trace supply chains all the way back to raw materials, and they know materials can be commingled at processing steps. But, he said, artificial intelligence for data analytics can help penetrate murky supply chains, if you do not have a product that is amenable to other kinds of testing, such as DNA testing for cotton.

"The truth is, the vast majority of U.S. companies want to have compliance in this area. I think they are repulsed by the notion they have slave labor in their supply chains," he said. "We’re learning from them, and they’re learning from us. Through that, we’re gaining confidence to be satisfied that some shipments have a legitimate provenance ... ."

He said that companies supply weeks or months of lading bills, purchase orders and other paperwork to prove that their goods do not contain inputs from Xinjiang province.

"There's other instances in which companies haven’t been able to satisfy the burden, and in that case, their product is going to have to be destroyed or reexported," he said.

Silvers said CBP has had "growing pains" in enforcing UFLPA, but is realizing efficiencies so that they can process shipments faster without sacrificing enforcement rigor.

He said another priority for this year is to work to convince Australia, India, Europe and Japan to implement "similar enforcement regimes" to keep goods made in whole or in part from forced labor out of their markets.

"The goal here is to eradicate forced labor. We’re never going to be able to do that when there are markets that are open to forced labor," he said.