CPSC Vote on Draft Compliance Certificate Overhaul Delayed to Run Cost Analyses
The Consumer Product Safety Commission delayed its vote on a proposal to amend Part 1110 compliance certification requirements in order to conduct Paperwork Reduction Act cost analyses on General Certificates of Conformity for certain products, said a commission official. CPSC Commissioner Nancy Nord has said the rule would require electronic filing of CPSC compliance certificates along with other entry documents, and add new required data elements. It would also require the manufacturer or labeler to file the compliance certificate if the product is directly received by a consumer. The vote was originally scheduled for Jan. 16, but was pushed back indefinitely in a Jan. 15 Federal Register notice. “I expect it to come back up in a few weeks,” the official said.
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“The burden of developing the General Certificate under certain regulations has not been determined yet,” the official told us. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which requires the General Certificates of Conformity, mandated an ambitious timetable for CPSC rulemakings. CPSC had to put out regulations at a rate of one per month to meet the law’s requirements, the official said. As a result, some product-specific regulations from that time didn't specify which records need to be kept by importers for the General Certificates of Conformity, so CPSC didn’t conduct cost analyses on those requirements.
Now that CPSC is clarifying the GCC requirement through this Part 1110 proposal, CPSC is running these cost analyses, as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act. The official did not anticipate that any provisions of the draft proposal would change as a result of this work.
Once the proposed rule is published and the comment period begins, CPSC needs comments from the importing community, the official said. The propose rule will include several provisions CPSC still has questions on, and the commission will draw on comments to decide what ends up in the final version, he said.
(See ITT's Online Archives 13011004 for summary of Commissioner Nord's remarks at the annual USA-ITA conference on provisions of the draft proposed rule.)