Agencies Need More Resources for UFLPA Enforcement, US Task Force Says

DHS and its partner agencies need more funding and resources to handle the increasing enforcement scope of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF) said in the first update to its UFLPA strategy. The update, released Aug. 1 and required annually, also outlines new steps CBP is taking to upgrade its enforcement capabilities and describes plans to soon provide more UFLPA compliance guidance to importers.

The update comes about one year after the effective date of UFLPA’s rebuttable presumption, which prohibits imports from Xinjiang or from entities added to the UFLPA Entity List unless the importer can prove the goods were not produced with forced labor (see 2206210022). Through May, CBP said it has stopped more than 4,000 shipments of goods valued at over $1.3 billion for “enforcement action review.”

But the updated strategy also said “meaningful implementation of this effort requires resources,” and UFLPA didn’t allocate funding for activities carried out by the FLETF, the DHS-led body that monitors UFLPA enforcement. FLETF member agencies “have had to add the additional requirements related to implementing the UFLPA Strategy to current workloads and responsibilities,” the strategy said.

CBP is especially short on resources, the strategy said, noting that the agency added 65 new officers, analysts and other support staff in FY 2022 but still needs more. “The increased enforcement scope of the UFLPA” has “highlighted resource gaps for CBP to sustain consistent UFLPA operations across the 328 ports of entry, ten Centers of Excellence and Expertise, field offices, and headquarters,” the strategy said. The agency needs more resources to train and “develop trade expertise among its workforce, inclusively on the complexities of supply chains, risk management, and forced labor.”

CBP is investing in new “enterprise systems to improve diagnostic analysis used to synthesize data to significantly enhance forced labor enforcement efforts” and is planning “internal system enhancements to enforce UFLPA and facilitate legitimate trade.” The strategy mentioned its Advanced Trade Analytics Platform pilot (see 2301100071), which will help the agency “fuse trade data from multiple internal and external sources, and provide new capabilities for visualization, analysis, and reporting.”

CBP also is “exploring” emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, laboratory testing and distributed ledger technology, to identify and prohibit imports of goods made with forced labor. The agency has previously tested distributed ledger technology, where parties throughout the supply chain lodge data about a shipment that is "immutable" and can then be "available to those who need to know,” an agency official said earlier this year (see 2304270036).

Commercial “analytic products” have also proven useful to CBP, the strategy said. The agency recently awarded Altana a multiyear contract to map supply chains for the agency for CBP’s use in addressing forced labor (see 2307200066), and more “advancements can only be done through sustained funding for internal capabilities enhancements and external contracts,” the strategy said.

Homeland Security Investigations also needs more resources to continue its criminal investigations into people and companies benefiting from forced labor, the strategy said. As CBP increases import inspections for UFLPA compliance, this “may likely result in an increase in investigative leads and cases for HSI,” which will need more staffing “as the primary investigative agency responsible for responding to and investigating forced labor and counterfeiting crimes occurring at ports of entry.”

The strategy added: “To date, the funding and resources for HSI have not reflected the increased resources directly associated with the implementation of the UFLPA.” HSI would use more funding to hire additional officers for its Global Trade Investigations division and station more agents overseas “to investigate forced labor cases emanating from Xinjiang.”

Other agencies also need more resources, including the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans and the Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), the strategy said. ILAB conducts research to “support the full scope of work included under the FLETF” and has “contributed significantly” to CBP enforcement, but similar to other FLETF member agencies, it has “significantly shifted workload and priorities to meet the demands of the FLETF and UFLPA implementation.” ILAB “anticipates near and long-term resource needs to contribute fully to this ongoing work.”

The strategy also said FLETF wants to increase its industry outreach to provide more guidance to importers. Along with the body’s private meetings with nongovernmental organizations, companies and others, FLETF plans to “explore developing targeted engagements to address specific issues, such as private sector compliance efforts and due diligence challenges, or the NGO community’s activities in their evaluation of forced labor schemes and potential illicit actors.”

Even though the UFLPA identified a set of initial “high-priority sectors for enforcement,” the FLETF wants to emphasize monitoring of other sectors that have recently been identified by NGOs and academia. The strategy specifically mentioned “red dates and other agricultural products, vinyl products and downstream products, aluminum and downstream products, steel and downstream products, lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, copper and downstream products, electronics, and tires and other automobile components.”

The FLETF plans to “continue to collaborate with private sector stakeholders to identify issues and areas on which additional guidance would be helpful to support compliance and facilitate legitimate trade.”