The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
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 Commerce Department found that a countervailing duty investigation respondent's U.S. customers did not use China's Export Buyer's Credit Program in the investigation's final determination despite the Chinese government's continued failure to provide information, indicating a potential shift in how the agency will approach how it verifies non-use of the program.
The Court of International Trade on Oct. 12 sustained the Commerce Department's application of adverse facts available in an antidumping duty review on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam. After previously remanding Commerce's application of AFA for lack of substantial evidence, Judge Miller Baker sustained Commerce's remand results after Commerce switched out the grounds on which it based its AFA finding.
Judge Timothy Reif issued lengthy remand instructions Oct. 12 to the Commerce Department over its application of adverse facts available over China's Export Buyer's Credit Program in a countervailing duty review, citing the scene in the movie Philadelphia in which Denzel Washington's character asks Tom Hanks' character to explain something to him as he would to a two-year old.
The Court of International Trade on Oct. 12 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in the 14th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam. After previously remanding Commerce's application of adverse facts available for lack of substantial evidence, Judge Miller Baker sustained the AFA application after Commerce switched out the grounds on which it based its AFA finding. Initially, Commerce applied AFA based on the respondent's reporting failures related to customer relationships and factors of production reporting issues, but now bases the finding to the respondent's failure to maintain source documents and control number reporting issues.
An alleged transshipper in an antidumping and countervailing duty evasion investigation was allowed to intervene in a case at the Court of International Trade, per an Oct. 7 order. Kingtom Aluminio was originally denied the right to intervene for failing to show a legally protectable interest in the case. Judge Richard Eaton changed his tune in the most recent order, now agreeing that the company has a protectable interest.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Oct. 7 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
The Court of International Trade remanded the Commerce Department's final results in the administrative review of the countervailing duty order on certain passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China covering entries from 2017, in an Oct. 12 order. Commerce, as it has done many times before, applied adverse facts available relating to its inability to verify non-use of China's Export Buyer's Credit Program by the two mandatory respondents' U.S. customers. Judge Timothy Reif issued lengthy remand orders to Commerce, instructing the agency, for instance, to explain how one of the respondent's questionnaire statements showing its non-use of the program are unverifiable by describing Commerce's step-by-step methodology for verifying non-use.
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Singapore national Tang Yong Hoe, sole director of freight forwarding company I-Do Logistics, was fined $105,000 (in Singapore dollars) by the State Courts for evading Goods and Services Taxes and submitting false customs information, Singapore Customs said Oct. 4. In 2018, Singapore Customs inspected a container imported by I-Do and found discrepancies in the packing lists and I-Do's submitted values for goods belonging to two consignees. One consignee, Zhang Feng, received the packing list from I-Do and knowingly submitted the false information, the customs agency said. Zhang was fined $2,000. In total, Tang was found to have evaded over $16,000 in GST, leading to his fine exceeding $100,000. “Any person who is in any way concerned in any fraudulent evasion of, or attempt to fraudulently evade, any customs duty or excise duty shall be guilty of an offence and will be liable on conviction to a fine of up to 20 times the amount of duty and GST evaded,” Singapore Customs said.