Lawyer Seeing Uptick in BIS Outreaches

The Bureau of Industry and Society’s export enforcement arm is ramping up outreaches to exporters amid a rise in new restrictions against Russia and China, said Christopher Grigg, a former DOJ official. Grigg, now a lawyer with Nixon Peabody, said the agency’s Office of Export Enforcement is contacting more companies to specifically vet their record-keeping procedures.

“Increasingly our clients are seeing that” OEE agents “are reaching out to business,” he said during a March 24 webinar hosted by the Massachusetts Export Center. Grigg, the former National Security Division chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, said he’s “seeing records requests for all of your export control documents, all of these documents that you're required to preserve.”

“As these new regulations and sanctions are unfolding, the investigators are adapting and keeping up,” he said, “and they’re now looking at all these things.”

Grigg’s comments came about three weeks after Matt Axelrod, export enforcement chief at BIS, said the agency plans to increase the number of penalties it issues this year for export violations (see 2303030035). Other OEE officials last week said the agency is increasingly reaching out to companies that may be playing a part in allowing Iran to acquire U.S. drone parts, and also is checking companies’ compliance with new Russia and China controls (see 2303220037).

Companies need to “prepare” for a BIS outreach, Grigg said, and “make sure you have your ducks in a row, especially your documents.” He stressed that any exporter conducting business subject to the Export Administration Regulations needs to “maintain a very specific set of records,” including notes, contracts, invitations to bid, financial records and correspondence. He urged companies not to overlook correspondence, which can include email and other messaging applications, such as Slack.

“The best thing that you can do right now is take this as an opportunity,” Grigg said. “Look at your compliance programs, look at your record-keeping practices, make sure that you are actually preserving all of the records you are required to preserve.” Even if a company knows it hasn’t exported an item illegally, “if you fail to comply with the record keeping requirements,” he said, “that is itself a violation.”

Grigg added that BIS rarely reaches out to a company on a whim. “By the time those agencies are knocking on your door,” they’ve “done some homework already,” Grigg said. “There is some work and some investigation that has gone on, there's a reason why they are coming to you.”