The Federal Maritime Commission this week issued a series of long-awaited recommendations to address issues in the international freight delivery system that have been exacerbated over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The recommendations, which resulted from Commissioner Rebecca Dye’s fact-finding mission that began in March 2020, aim to minimize barriers to Shipping Act enforcement and better allow the FMC to “facilitate prompt and fair dispute resolution,” Dye said July 28.

The U.S. may need to create new, stronger tools other than its current sanctions and export controls to penalize foreign countries that violate international laws, said Nazak Nikakhtar, former acting undersecretary of the Bureau of Industry and Security. While Nikakhtar cautioned the U.S. against overusing trade restrictions, she also said they need to be bolstered because some foreign governments and companies are “easily” circumventing them.

The Bureau of Industry and Security is “very busy” working to implement the semiconductor supply chain recommendations (see 2107140047) that arose from President Joe Biden’s February executive order (see 2102240068), including directives to pursue more collaboration with industry and a review of export controls and investment restrictions, a senior BIS official said. Sahar Hafeez, a senior adviser at BIS, said the agency will continue implementing those recommendations “in the weeks and months ahead.”

Congress should establish a rebuttable presumption that certain technology exports sold to China will be used to violate human rights, said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. Malinowski, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he pushed to include that language in a previous House version of the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement (EAGLE) Act but the wording “kept on getting stripped by the Senate” for “mysterious” reasons. “There is a very strong behind-the-scenes lobby against that from whatever elements of corporate America continue to profit from that trade,” Malinowski said in a Capitol hallway interview July 27, specifically pointing to facial recognition technology.

A Commerce Department technical advisory committee is considering proposing an exception for U.S. deemed export regulations to allow U.S. businesses to better compete with foreign companies. The potential exception, which hasn’t been finalized but was discussed during a July 27 meeting of the Sensors and Instrumentation Technical Advisory Committee, would authorize certain deemed exports to company employees, contractors or interns if the items are for “internal company use.” Committee members said the exception wouldn’t be eligible for deemed exports to foreign nationals from Country Groups E:1 and E:2, which includes Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories for July 19-23 in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

CBP’s Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee’s full Export Modernization White Paper includes a range of appendices that provide greater insight into how CBP and the COAC envision export modernization. The 127-page paper, originally issued as an abbreviated 24-page version in June, defines the roles and responsibilities of parties in the export process, dives further into export modernization recommendations and includes a range of areas in the Foreign Trade Regulations that will likely be revised. The other appendices include an analysis of Electronic Export Information data elements, information on post-departure filing and other documents produced by the COAC’s working groups.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control fined a New York online money transmitter and provider more than $1.4 million for violating U.S. sanctions on the Crimea region of Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and Syria. Payoneer came to a settlement agreement with OFAC after illegally processing more than 2,000 payments for parties in sanctioned countries, OFAC said in a July notice. The fine was OFAC’s third highest this year.

The Treasury Department released its annual report to Congress for fiscal year 2020 on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., outlining CFIUS statistics, key judgments and an overview of transactions reviewed by the committee. Unlike previous annual reports, the FY20 version includes statistics on declarations required for transactions involving critical technologies. The report includes numbers on the declarations made under the requirements, which took effect in October but applied to transactions after Feb. 13, 2020 (see 2009140041), and the pilot program that preceded the requirements.

The U.S. should expand certain foreign investment reporting requirements and establish a list of trusted partner countries that are exempt from investment screening disclosures, the House Armed Services Committee said last week. The committee presented the comments in a July 22 report from its bipartisan Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force, which said the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. can be used more efficiently to help make critical defense supply chains more secure.