SBA Office to Push for Clearer Customs Rules and Advanced Ruling Publication Procedures in NAFTA
The Small Business Association (SBA) Office of Small Business Development Centers will during NAFTA renegotiations push for simple, clear customs rules and provisions dictating publication of rulings and regulations before export, SBA Office of International Trade (OIT) Associate Administrator Peter Cazamias told the House Small Business Committee June 21. “We will have to press for ensuring that our trade partners publish all regulations and administrative rulings beforehand, so that businesses have fair notice … to read those to ensure intellectual protection for all of our -- especially -- high-tech-type companies that put their data secrets at risk when they trade,” he said. That SBA office will have a seat at the negotiating table, where it will discuss solutions for general trade hindrances for small businesses, such as unnecessary customs complexity, unfair intellectual property rights protection and overly complex rules, Cazamias said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Regulatory coherence will be an undergirding theme of SBA’s proposals for NAFTA, he said. OIT will ramp up training to prepare field staff and resource partners for counseling small business owners once an updated NAFTA enters into force, Cazamias said in written testimony to the committee (here). To ensure success toward that end, OIT will seek to strengthen collaboration with CBP for border logistics, the Commerce Department for market access, and the Export-Import Bank for export credit insurance and other financing options, he said.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., urged the SBA to work to increase import and export opportunities between U.S.-based, Latino-owned businesses and free trade agreement countries spread across North, Central and South America. Cazamias said “it’s a low-hanging fruit” to find ways to connect U.S. “diaspora communities” with opportunities for export to their originating nation. The SBA is considering a policy to boost export opportunities for diaspora communities, he said. “What we’re thinking about is more in the realm of export promotion, as opposed to the trade agreement aspect of it,” Cazamias said.
As required under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recently sent to Congress a plan to integrate resources and strategies of state trade promotion agencies into the overall federal trade promotion program, Patrick Kirwan, director of the interagency Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee Secretariat based at Commerce, said in written testimony (here). One of the major initiatives of that plan is to make sure counselors can provide more in-depth information to small businesses, he said during the hearing. “It could be from one of our Department of Commerce top market reports that talk about what the industry opportunities are overseas, our country commercial guides, making sure that all the regulations that a company would face in a particular market are transparent and readily available to both our counselors and to small businesses, focusing on that,” Kirwan said.
Cazamias added that SBA is doing a “360-degree review” of its State Trade Expansion Program (STEP), which provides award funds to state and territory governments, funneling one-year financing terms to small businesses for export capacity development. The review has found that STEP awardees sometimes aren’t able to take any trips the first three months of the year they get the money, because of the short notice of financing approval, he said. Cazamias added: “We are going to be looking at everything, possibly extending the program to two years, or taking a look at maybe providing more flexibility at the local or state level.”