ITC Wrongly Altered Official Import Statistics to Find Negligibility, Petitioners Say

Petitioners filed a motion for judgment May 1 contesting the International Trade Commission’s negligibility finding regarding aluminum extrusions from the Dominican Republic imported from 2022 to 2023. They alleged that the initial data collected by the ITC proved the imports exceeded the negligibility threshold, but that the commission unlawfully altered that data and ignored evidence that imports seem to be increasing over time (U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition v. U.S., CIT # 23-00270).

The petitioners, led by the U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition, said that the purpose of their appeal is to challenge the commission’s decision to ignore record evidence and find that “no likelihood exists” that contrary evidence could arise later in an antidumping injury investigation that would show subject imports from the Dominican Republic were actually non-negligible. They said they're not contesting the ITC’s “specific methodology" (see 2312270039).

They said that the ITC should have accepted official import statistics, which are “usually reliable,” instead of making its own adjustments to the data before starting its negligibility analysis. That resulted in inaccurate evidence, leading to an inaccurate conclusion, they said.

The ITC both wrongly added and removed data during its calculation, they claimed -- including nonsubject merchandise in the calculation’s denominator and excluding the import data of firms that said they didn’t import the products during the review period, essentially taking them at their word.

First, the ITC shouldn’t have counted all goods exported from the Dominican Republic that include aluminum extrusions as component parts in its negligibility ratio’s denominator, they said. This occurred because, contrary to instructions, such imports were included in questionnaire responses given to the commission for the investigation. And despite the ITC staff “caution[ing] that questionnaire responses ‘may be over-inclusive,’” the data was used anyway, they said.

The commission also relied on preliminary questionnaire responses to adjust the official statistics for th Dominican Republic’s U.S. imports despite the fact that those responses were incomplete, they said.

“Given the low coverage afforded by preliminary questionnaire responses, and their role as the sole data source rendering Dominican subject imports negligible at the preliminary phase, it is impossible to reasonably say that no evidence of non-negligibility could later arise,” they said.

Together, the petitioners said, this meant the ITC was working off inaccurate data.

They also argued the commission’s decision to terminate its injury investigation on the products came far too early, even though several other factors should have indicated to the ITC that it should have waited.

First, they said that, according to the commission itself, "termination at the preliminary phase of these investigations based on a finding of negligible imports would not be appropriate when the parameters of the scope definition ... are not clear."

But the Commerce Department warned that it planned to continue evaluating the antidumping duty order’s scope when it initiated its own investigation on the products, they said.

And they said that the share of aluminum extrusions imported to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic was “growing at a rapid rate,” outpacing those from all other countries.

That growth trajectory percentage -- redacted from the public version of the brief -- “plainly demonstrates the ‘potential’ for imminent non-negligibility,” the petitioners said.