CBP Correctly Liquidated Entries at AD Rate That Had Been Partially Revoked, US Says

The U.S. filed a cross-motion for summary judgment March 25 in a case contesting CBP’s assessment of antidumping duties on an importer’s entries of a product that had been exempted from an AD order (see 2401080040). In the cross-motion, the government said that the liquidation had gone ahead because the importer hadn't filed the proper entry documentation (Kiswire Inc. v. U.S., CIT Consol. #22-00181).

Importer Kiswire entered three wire rod shipments from South Korea in 2018 at an AD rate of 41.1%. The following year, the Commerce Department partially revoked the order for high carbon wire rod for use in producing tire cord. The partial revocation applied to Kiswire's entries, retroactively to the period in which Kiswire filed them, but Commerce also put in place a requirement that an end-use certification be filed at time of entry saying the high carbon wire rod would in fact be used to produce tire cord.

Kiswire said it filed a post-summary correction and end-use certification for each (see 2207200028). CBP denied the corrections in 2020 because it said the entries were suspended until the conclusion of a new AD review.

In 2021, Kiswire said that CBP liquidated all three shipments without refunding the duties the importer deposited upon entry.

However, Kiswire’s entries were not affected by Commerce’s partial revocation of the AD order on steel wire rod, the government said. That partial revocation included the condition that an entry’s end-use certification must have been filed alongside its entry summary in order for it to be excluded from the order, it said.

It said that, in 2019, Commerce ordered CBP to liquidate all shipments of wire rod from Korea whose end-use certifications had been filed at the time of their entry summaries and to refund all those AD deposits.

The U.S. admitted that Kiswire had filed end-use certifications for its entries. However, the importer didn't do so alongside entry summaries, it said. Therefore, those entries didn't fall within the scope of the revocation, it said.

And even if Kiswire’s entries should have been liquidated at the time of the partial revocation, CBP’s failure to do so at the time meant they would have liquidated automatically six months later, in October 2019, it said. At that time, they would have automatically liquidated at their original rate -- 41.1%, it said.

The government also said that Kiswire’s complaints that CBP officials told the company otherwise multiple times “are misguided and fail to persuade” because the partial revocation itself “provided public and unambiguous notice that the suspension was removed for subject entries for which an end-user certification was filed at the time of entry summary.”

“That the notice did not address how to liquidate entries which did not meet this requirement (such as the subject entries) does not make the notice ambiguous,” it said.