Lumber Trade Group Says Commerce Still Making 'Mathematical Error' in Review Results

A petitioner, a domestic lumber trade group, pushed back against the Commerce Department's ultimate post-remand finding that subsidies received by unaffiliated lumber suppliers were applicable to a few expedited Canadian lumber review respondents, but that those subsidies had no effect on the respondents’ rates. It again alleged that the department had made a “mathematical error” (Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber International Trade Investigations or Negotiations v. U.S., CIT # 19-00122).

The department held in the remand results (see 2409130057) that the respondents, D&G/Portbec and Rustique, were trading companies for four unaffiliated Canadian lumber producers and thus beneficiaries of subsidies received by those producers. Petitioner Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber International Trade Investigations or Negotiation, or COALITION, agreed with the finding.

But D&G/Portbec continued to receive a de minimis rate because it conducted very few transactions with those four producers, Commerce said. Rustique likewise still received a combination rate.

COALITION argued again that Commerce “made a mathematical error” in regard to D&G/Portbec's CVD calculation that meant that portions of each cross-owned entity’s lumber purchases and subsidies went unaccounted for in the respondent's overall final subsidy rate, it said.

The department disagreed in its remand results, saying that D&G and Portbec “purchased meaningfully different volume of lumber from unaffiliated producers” and needed to be separated. It described its calculation as “determin[ing] the percentage of each company’s unaffiliated lumber purchases in relation to their portion of combined sales and then multiply[ing] those shares by the all-others rate to derive a subsidy rate for the unaffiliated lumber producers that is attributable to D&G and Portbec.”

But this didn’t actually address the issue, COALITION claimed. All it meant, the petitioner said, was that Commerce reached separate rates for each entity using a calculation that included only the individual entity's share of lumber purchases in the numerator, but the entities' combined total sales in the denominator.

It asked the court to remand again for Commerce to fix the error.