The Treasury Department published its spring 2019 regulatory agenda for CBP. The agenda includes a new rulemaking that would amend CBP's regulations to revise the language on duty-free goods returned. The agency will try to issue an interim final rule by August this year. Specifically, the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act extended duty-free treatment to products of non-U.S. origin exported and returned to the U.S. within three years after having been exported, and created a separate tariff schedule "subheading for returned U.S. Government property allowing duty-free return of U.S. Government property without time and origin restrictions."
Uzbekistan human rights activists who traveled to Washington -- and the Uzbek ambassador -- are asking the textile industry to ends its boycott of Uzbek cotton, because of new government policies that have ended child labor and greatly reduced forced labor during the harvest.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has joined with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, to propose that U.S. and Mexican officials inspect Mexican factories suspected of violating labor standards. Wyden's staff said that if that violation was verified, the U.S. would not give its products duty-free entry, and if there was forced labor, it could block imports from those factories entirely.
CBP should adopt a new e-commerce multi-modal supply chain map to help guide decisions in that area, the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) Next Generation Facilitation Subcommittee E-commerce Working Group said in a draft recommendation. CBP released the document ahead of the Feb. 27 Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) meeting. The agency should use the map when "considering future policy, automation development, enforcement postures, facilitation programs and education effort," the group said.
The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) for CBP will next meet Feb. 27 in Washington, D.C., CBP said in a notice.
CBP issued a new withhold release order due to suspicions of goods made by forced labor, according to CBP's list of such orders. The WRO is dated Feb. 4 and applies to "Seafood." CBP didn't specify a country for the WRO and only lists "Fishing Vessel: Tunago No. 61" as the manufacturer. The new WRO marks the first action so far this year related to forced labor. CBP didn't comment.
The International Trade Commission posted the 2019 Basic Edition of the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule. The new HTS implements the removal of Mauritania from eligibility for African Growth and Opportunity Act benefits, makes widespread changes to units of measure throughout the tariff schedule, and adds new statistical suffixes for infant footwear, aluminum foil and paper, among other products. Most changes took effect Jan. 1.
A racketeering lawsuit alleging manipulation of the antidumping and countervailing duty process by competitors may proceed, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Jan. 23 overturned portions of a lower court decision that had dismissed the case. Harmoni International may have been directly injured by collusion between importers and lawyers in the U.S. and Chinese garlic interests because it was forced to expend resources in a fight to keep its AD rate from going up, the appeals court said.
Some new tariff provisions in the 2019 edition of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule have already been implemented, despite the ongoing partial federal government shutdown and the resulting lack of any official version published by the International Trade Commission. According to documents recently posted by the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, changes affect classification for infant footwear, aluminum foil and paper, among other products. Extensive changes were also made to units of measure throughout the tariff schedule. On the other hand, changes made by a recent presidential proclamation, including the removal of African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) benefits for Mauritania, have yet to be implemented by CBP, the NCBFAA has said. The following is a summary of the purported changes to the tariff schedule:
International Trade Today is providing readers with some of the top stories for Dec. 17-21 in case they were missed.