Commerce Wrongly Accepted Late Methodology Revision During Verification, Petitioners Say
In a motion for judgment filed Jan. 14, petitioners said the Commerce Department was wrong to use exporter OM Materials’ revised information on verification in its antidumping duty investigation on ferrosilicon from Malaysia (CC Metals and Alloys v. United States, CIT # 25-00131).
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The department also delayed too long before redesignating the exporter’s U.S. sales as constructed export sales, petitioners CC Metals and Alloys and Ferroglobe USA said in the motion.
First, OM Materials “fundamentally revised its reporting methodology at verification” for its CONNUMs, which had a “cascading” effect on the rest of its information, the petitioners said. Instead of accepting the information as a “minor correction,” Commerce should have applied total adverse facts available, they said.
“CONNUMs are the heart and soul of an accurate AD calculation,” they said.
OM Materials initially reported its CONNUMs based on “specifications listed in the sales contracts” for its products, they said. But then, while getting ready for verification, it said that it switched to using test certificates, they said.
Commerce’s decision to accept this new information resulted “in the creation of entirely new CONNUMs” and “a revised cost database,” they said.
And Commerce didn’t verify all of it, despite the department’s insistence otherwise, they claimed. The record showed that its verification of the test certificates was “incomplete,” they said. Commerce did verify that there was a difference between the exporter’s sales and production numbers, they said, but didn’t verify that the test certificates were more accurate than the sales contracts.
They also argued that OM Materials’ U.S. sales should have been treated as export sales, not constructed export sales. The exporter used “the same procedures and paperwork” in all its relevant U.S. sales. Commerce usually looks to the exporter’s own course of conduct when deciding whether to treat sales as export or constructed export sales, but it wrongly failed to do so in this case, they said.