New CBP Trade Enforcement Task Force to Take on AD/CV Duty Evasion, Forced Labor Shipments
A Trade Enforcement Task Force within CBP's Office of Trade will allow the agency to better focus on antidumping and countervailing duty evasion and stopping products manufactured using forced labor, said CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske during a conference held by metal trade associations on May 2 (here). "The task force will allow us to more aggressively enforce the approximately 270 AD/CVD orders on steel, alloy, and other metal products -- 150 on steel products alone," he said at the joint meeting of the American Iron and Steel Institute and the Metals Service Center Institute. "The CBP task force will harness the agency’s collective trade enforcement expertise as a focal point for coordination with other government agency partners," said the agency in a separate news release (here).
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The new task for also leverages the "new enforcement authorities of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015," CBP said. The agency is also building upon a strategy to resolve AD/CVD debts, which included the creation last year of "an AD/CVD Collections team within our Office of Administration, which increases CBP’s technical expertise around AD/CVD processes; enables earlier identification of importers unwilling or unable to pay outstanding bills; and better integrates processes to anticipate AD/CVD debts, rather than simply react to those debts after they are formally established," Kerlikowske said.
CBP is "constantly enhancing AD/CVD detection and enforcement protocols, improving our targeting and analysis, and employing all available authorities to disrupt increasingly complex evasion," he said. CBP is also planning a steel enforcement operation with the Canadian Border Services Agency and "reached out to Mexican Customs to discuss similar options," he said.