Commerce Arbitrarily Rejected Scope Ruling Application It Deemed 'Duplicative', Exporter Says

A glycine exporter moved for judgment July 23 in a case charging that the Commerce Department unreasonably rejected its allegedly “duplicative” scope ruling application after a previous request, which the exporter argued lacked key information, resulted in a ruling it disagreed with (Deer Park Glycine v. U.S., CIT # 24-00016).

Because the department rejected the request as duplicative, exporter Deer Park wasn’t able to “resubmit the full application at any time, with all identified deficiencies corrected,” as allowed by law, it said. It also denied that the second application was duplicative.

Deer Park, a domestic producer that recently purchased exporter GEO Specialty Chemicals, Inc., brought its complaint in January (see 2401260069). In that complaint, and in its July motion for judgment, it argued that the department’s decision to reject its scope ruling application was “arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by substantial evidence, and an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

The exporter said it initially sought in August to find out if antidumping and countervailing duty orders on glycine from India and China covered its calcium glycinate. Although Commerce ruled in 2012 that a very similar product, sodium glycinate, was, it held in October that the calcium glycinate was too far removed from glycine in the manufacturing process to be considered the latter.

So the following month, in November, Deer Park submitted a second scope ruling application that included excerpts from Commerce’s 2012 ruling, along with a few from the original petition and other early filings. This second ruling request, unlike the first, asked whether calcium glycinate is a crude form of glycine; the first inquired simply whether calcium glycinate was a precursor to glycine, it said.

Commerce’s regulations don’t stop it from “initiating a scope ruling proceeding when an application concerns a product at issue in a previous scope ruling proceeding,” Deer Park noted, citing several cases in which similar products such as curtain wall units and mixed-wax candles were ruled on by Commerce within a short period of time.

As a result, the department acted arbitrarily because it didn’t explain why Deer Park's own second scope ruling was “precluded by the referenced provision,” it said.