Senators Urge Tougher Commerce Dept. Action on AD/CV Duty Rates
Ohio Sens. Rob Portman, R, and Sherrod Brown, D, wrote a letter (here) to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker expressing concern that her department is not applying “adverse facts available” comprehensively enough in trade cases involving uncooperative governments and businesses. The letter, which contains 20 other signatures from Democratic and Republican senators, said “time is of the essence” in implementing new authorities to mitigate the “devastating” impacts that illegal dumping has had on domestic production and employment. The “adverse facts available” principle allows the Commerce Department flexibility in assessing AD/CVD rates, and gives it ultimate discretion to apply the highest available countervailing subsidy rates or dumping margins in proceedings where a foreign entity provides insufficient information or fails to cooperate.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The letter largely challenges Commerce to fully implement the June-signed Leveling the Playing Field Act, which is aimed at simplifying and expediting AD/CVD assessments. “With these changes to law, Congress intended the Department’s use of [adverse facts available] to be protected from legal challenge and for AFA to be applied in cases marked by a respondent’s refusal to provide information in either preliminary or final determinations,” said the lawmakers.