Importer High Life and the U.S. settled a False Claims Act case in which the company was charged with knowingly underreporting the value of apparel entries, leading it to avoid duty payments. According to a stipulation and order of settlement filed Jan. 25 at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, High Life will pay the government $1.3 million, $650,000 of which counts as restitution. The company agreed to fully cooperate with the U.S. investigation of the other individuals and entities linked to the customs fraud scheme (United States v. High Life, S.D.N.Y. # 23-00631).
Customs Duty
A Customs Duty is a tariff or tax which a country imposes on goods when they are transported across international borders. Customs Duties are used to protect countries' economies, residents, jobs, and environments, by limiting the flow of imported merchandise, especially restricted and prohibited goods, into the country. The Customs Duty Rate is a percentage determined by the value of the article purchased in the foreign country and not based on quality, size, or weight.
Despite concerns from customs brokers that new provisions in CBP’s recent Part 111 final rule could hurt their client relationships, a new reporting requirement for termination of the broker-client relationship should rarely come up, and another provision on record-keeping by brokers when they discover client compliance issues carries with it some silver linings, customs experts said on a Jan. 25 webinar.
The Commerce Department issued Federal Register notices on its recently initiated antidumping duty investigations on gas powered pressure washers from China and Vietnam (A-570-148, A-552-008) and a countervailing duty investigation on gas powered pressure washers from China (C-570-149). The agency will determine whether imports of gas powered pressure washers are being sold in the U.S. at less than fair value or are illegally subsidized.
A U.S. manufacturer and a labor union seek the imposition of new antidumping duties on tin mill products from Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and the U.K., as well as new countervailing duties on tin mill products from China, they said in petitions filed with the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission Jan. 18. Commerce will now decide whether to begin AD/CVD investigations, which could result in the imposition of permanent AD/CVD orders and the assessment of AD and CVD on importers. Cleveland-Cliffs and the United Steelworkers Union filed the petitions.
Dozens of firms, large and small -- along with trade groups from agriculture and manufacturing -- asked the U.S. Trade Representative to retain or even increase Section 301 tariffs on their competitors' exports. The companies that said the Section 301 tariffs are providing leverage and leveling the playing field included a number of politically important and large steel industry players, such as Nucor, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs. Opponents argued in the same docket that the tariffs had not met their aim, were driving inflation, or having unintended consequences on manufacturers (see 2301180029).
Hundreds of companies, as well as trade groups from agriculture, retailers and manufacturing, have told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that the Section 301 tariffs on $350 million in Chinese goods have not achieved their aim, have hurt U.S. businesses and, often, have not even moved production to other countries in Asia or to Mexico.
A recent change to how customs brokers get duty-free certificates for entries under government military contracts will not affect submission of the certificates to CBP, the agency said in a CSMS message. The decommissioning of the Defense Contract Management Agency’s duty-free entry eTool system “has no impact on the submission of duty-free certificates for CBP purposes,” CBP said. Brokers will not have access to the new Procurement Integrated Enterprise Environment (PIEE) that replaces eTool.
Regulatory agencies with a hand in trade included relatively few new trade-related rulemakings in their regulatory agendas for fall 2022. While the Commerce Department did include one new rule related to its antidumping and countervailing duty procedures, FDA, USDA and other partner government agencies (PGAs) largely continued to list rules that had been listed in previous agendas but not yet published.
CBP has released the quarterly Internal Revenue Service interest rates used to calculate interest on overdue accounts (underpayments) and refunds (overpayments) of customs duties. For the quarter that began Jan. 1, the interest rates for overpayments is 6% for corporations and 7% for non-corporations, and the interest rate for underpayments is 7% for both corporations and non-corporations. That's up from 5%, 6% and 6% in the previous quarter, respectively (see 2209190027). These interest rates are subject to change for the following quarter, CBP said.
Senate Finance Committee member Bill Cassidy, R-La., wants the government to greatly expand its tariff liberalization, to cover many South American and Central American countries and to cover goods made in factories that moved from China to the Western Hemisphere.