US Says Unusual Number of Circumvention Inquiry Participants Limited Available Resources

In a 131-page brief before the Court of International Trade, the U.S. responded Sept. 20 to claims by plaintiffs that its circumvention finding regarding Vietnamese hardwood plywood was flawed. It said again that the Commerce Department’s decision to not pick a mandatory respondent was fair and that adverse facts available had been correctly applied to 20 exporters (Shelter Forest International Acquisition v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 23-00144).

Commerce chose to apply AFA to the 20 exporters after finding that they had “provided inconsistent or conflicting information regarding the species of wood they consumed, the identities of their suppliers, and/or the products they imported from China.” Their information also conflicted with import data placed on the record by the Vietnamese government, it said.

The department hadn’t chosen a mandatory respondent for the inquiry, saying that it had issued multiple survey questionnaires to Vietnamese plywood exporters but received none back from any that manufactured plywood under the process Commerce was investigating (see 2407030078).

In turn, the exporters argued that they weren’t given the chance to correct the record after their “minor, explainable, or unrelated discrepancies in their quantity and value initial and supplemental questionnaire responses,” which they said were just corrections (see 2404020054).

Lacking a mandatory respondent, “Commerce had to account for a significant number of respondents, and thus requested specific information on the respondents’ inputs, suppliers, and affiliates of hardwood plywood,” the government said in its Sept. 20 brief. As a result, despite what the exporters argued, the department couldn’t have issued supplemental questionnaires to all companies it found to have provided insufficient information. It instead issued two non-company specific supplements covering the major issues the department had found in the responses, it said.

“Here, Commerce was faced with limited resources and the intensive task of analyzing information from 50 different companies and the Vietnamese government; it thus acted reasonably by distributing supplemental questionnaires more broadly applicable to the pool of respondents.”

The department also notified the plaintiffs of deficiencies in those two supplemental questionnaires, it said.

And the government pushed back against the plaintiffs’ “equity”-based arguments: one that a three-year-long period of review was abusive, and another that Commerce took far too long in reaching its own determinations.

Commerce reasonably exercised its discretion in increasing the period of review to three years due to “the highly unusual number of respondents, the scope of the inquiries, and the large volume of record information (as well as its finite resources),” the U.S. said. The amount of time Commerce required to complete the review hailed from the same cause, it said.