CBP plans to make its next unit of quantity changes to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States on Jan. 1, 2020, CBP said in a March 8 notice. The changes are necessary under the drawback provisions in the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, which require CBP to be able to "identify a standard 'per unit' quantity" at the HTSUS level, CBP said in a fact sheet. "To meet the Drawback requirements stipulated by TFTEA, CBP will be changing all the statistical suffixes with a unit of quantity (UOQ) of 'X' to a standardized unit of measurement such as kilograms ('kg') or number ('No.')," the agency said. "A UOQ of X indicates importers do not report a quantity, other than gross weight, which conflicts with the Drawback data collection requirements outlined by TFTEA."
Supply chain location changes are difficult and take time, so companies are turning to other ways to avoid or reduce Sections 301 and 232 tariffs, experts said at a March 7 Georgetown Law International Trade Update (see 1903070033) panel on the Trump administration and the supply chain. For steel and aluminum imports, there's been "a big uptake in foreign-trade zones," said Lynlee Brown, a senior manager at Ernst & Young. With Section 301, companies are using drawback, and after a recent CMS message, they may be taking advantage more often of substitution drawback. But the best bang for the buck, Brown said, is in customs valuation. Companies are making changes there not only because of Section 301, but also because of the administration's tax reform.
General Electric, a major U.S. exporter, remains supportive of "the notion of trying to open markets," said Drew Quinn, director of trade policy at GE. But, the tariffs the U.S. is using to try to bludgeon China into a more open stance are worse than the status quo, he said. Quinn, who was speaking at a March 5 Washington International Trade Association program on Asia, said that tariffs are generally pretty low on the aircraft engines, MRI machines and turbines it sells. There aren't a lot of investment barriers, either. "The biggest issue for us is the host country's industrial policies, and how they favor their national champions," he said. But even there, Quinn said, GE has found a way to work with foreign countries where it has facilities, and has been able to participate in subsidies. "We may have a different and less absolutist position than some people."
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
CBP is seeking comments by April 26 on an existing information collection for protests of CBP decisions, it said in a notice. CBP proposes to extend the expiration date of this information collection with no change to the information collected or to the estimated burden hours associated with the collection.
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
CBP will deploy its updated Form 5106 (Create/Update Importer Identity Form) on March 16, CBP said in a Feb. 20 notice. "The legacy Importer Create/Update ABI application (TI) will be disabled at 8:00 pm on Friday, March 15, 2019," CBP said. "Any submissions of the TI after that time will be rejected. During the outage window, the new ACE Importer Create/Update functionality for Trade and CBP users will be deployed to ACE production. Legacy importer accounts will be converted to new ACE as part of the deployment of the 5106 in new ACE. Any new ACE Importer Create/Update submissions (TP) submitted to ACE prior to completion of the deployment will be held in queue and processed once the entire deployment is completed."
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Drawback filers may “effective immediately” submit claims for refunds on Section 301 or Section 201 duties, CBP said in a Feb. 8 CSMS message. Filers will no longer receive error messages related to unit of measure (UOM) mismatches that had been occurring “because the underlying import did not have a UOM associated to a Chapter 99” tariff number or because they had left the mandatory UOM field blank, CBP said.