EAPA Petitioner Said ORR Illegally Reversed TRLED's Evasion Finding on Cabinets and Vanities

CBP's Office of Regulations and Rulings (ORR) ignored key evidence when it reversed the same agency's Trade Remedy & Law Enforcement Directorate's (TRLED) finding that importer Scioto Valley Woodworking evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on wooden cabinets and vanities from China, petitioner American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance said in a July 11 complaint at the Court of International Trade (American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance v. U.S., CIT # 23-00140).

The American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance cited the evidence relied on by TRLED to make its case, including the fact that Scioto, Malaysian manufacturer Alno Industry and Chinese company Qingdao Haiyan Group Co. admitted that evasion in the form of transshipment through Malaysia took place after U.S. buyer Cabinets to Go filed a civil suit against the companies.

The petitioner group had filed the Enforce and Protect Act allegation against Scioto in 2022, claiming that Scioto was evading AD/CVD by saying its imports of wooden cabinets were made by Alno in Malaysia. Scioto, Alno and China-based manufacturer Qingdao Haiyan Group Co. are all owned by Chinese firm Haiyan. The petitioner said in the allegation that Cabinets to Go discovered that Scioto and Alno were evading the duties via an inspector it hired to monitor Alno's Malaysian facilities. The petitioner group added that Haiyan admitted that the goods were actually made in China after Cabinets to Go asked Haiyan to certify that the goods shipped from Malaysia were actually made there and not China.

In the ensuing investigation, CBP's TRLED ultimately found a host of "discrepancies and reporting failures by Alno." Some of these discrepancies included Alno's "failure to account for its lack of purchases of glass that was needed to make certain cabinet doors" sold to the U.S. and "numerous missing documents that related to the purchase of finished goods." The TRLED said it couldn't verify the accuracy of information key to finding whether Alno transshipped Chinese goods to the U.S., and found that Scioto was guilty of evasion by way of adverse facts avialble.

ORR reversed the finding after conducting a de novo review of TRLED's decision. The agency said that "while Alno and Scioto may not have acted perfectly in responding to information requests by CBP, in our view, when the record is examined as a whole, it supports a conclusion that they cooperated and complied with requests for information made by CBP such that application of a wholesale adverse inference to Scioto is not justified."