Customs duties are estimated at $72 billion in the current fiscal year, and the White House projects that number will climb to $92 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. It projects that duties then will fall to $54 billion the following year.
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.
The recent executive order to strengthen e-commerce enforcement is ambiguous, and how CBP plans to heed the order's call to restrict access to importer of record numbers based on customs and intellectual property rights violations is unclear, Sandler Travis lawyer Paula Connelly said. That's because, currently, domestic importers use their tax IDs to register with CBP, and only companies that have no offices in the U.S. file for an importer of record number.
CBP's notice on the coming Section 301 tariff decrease (see 2002040045) and the agency's treatment of List 4A goods in foreign-trade zones are drawing some industry concerns. The CBP notice said the duty rate for goods subject to the tariffs in FTZs is based on “the rate of duty and tax in force on the date of filing the application for privileged foreign status.” CBP's interpretation “is inconsistent with existing CBP precedent and [we] will be challenging it on behalf of our a number of clients,” said Sidley lawyer Ted Murphy in a blog post.
The Commerce Department issued notices in the Federal Register on its recently initiated antidumping duty investigations on wood moulding and millwork products from China and Brazil (A-570-117, A-351-853), and countervailing duty investigation on wood moulding and millwork products from China (C-570-118).
Indonesia has given its customs officials the authority to stop counterfeit goods at the border, and just in 2020, has already seized $1 billion rupiah, or $73,000, worth of counterfeits that were set for export, according to Iwan Freddy Hari Susanto, charge d'affaires for the Indonesian Embassy. He was testifying Jan. 31 at a hearing on Indonesia's eligibility for the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, and was describing numerous actions the country has taken to improve protections for intellectual property rights holders.
U.S. importers of Chinese goods inundated the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative with more than 2,800 List 4A tariff-exclusion requests in the 24 hours before the web portal went dark at 11:59 p.m. EST Jan. 31, the public docket shows. The surge came amid the huge backlog of List 3 requests still awaiting disposition. The requests filed Jan. 31 were nearly a third of the 8,800 requests posted in the three months after the portal went live on Halloween Day. Importers that are granted exclusions would qualify for refunds of the 15 percent duties paid on goods entering the country, retroactive to Sept. 1, 2019, when the tariffs took effect. The List 4A tariffs are scheduled for a Feb. 14 rollback to 7.5 percent when the U.S.-China phase one trade deal goes into force.
CBP collected $71.9 billion in customs duties during fiscal year 2019, a 73 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, the agency said in a news release about its latest annual report on the agency's travel and trade statistics. “This is a staggering increase in duty collections, linked directly to the Administration’s trade remedy measures under Sections 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.” CBP said in the report. “Whereas remedies were only in place for part of fiscal year 2018, they were in place for the entire fiscal year in 2019.”
CBP remains cautious in moving toward continuing education requirements for customs brokers as it continues to examine the issues that derailed a similar effort some years ago, said Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Trade, during a Jan. 29 interview with International Trade Today. CBP recently launched a task force on the subject (see 1910160056), but the agency is considering whether an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) is necessary before issuing an actual proposal, she said.
The following is a selection of articles that appeared in International Trade Today in 2019 covering ruling letters. CBP frequently publishes rulings months after they are issued, so these articles are included based on the dates the articles were published, rather than the date the ruling letter was issued.
CBP published several thousand prospective rulings in 2019 on its Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) database. The agency issues its rulings from either the National Commodity Specialist Division in New York, which handles issues like classification, country of origin, marking and preferential treatment, or the Office of Regulations and Rulings at CBP headquarters in Washington, D.C., which may also decide other issues, such as valuation, drawback, exclusion order enforcement and liquidation.