Recent CIT Opinions Bar Separation of Subassemblies, Finished Merch Exclusion in Scope Case, Importers Say
Two recent Court of International Trade decisions are relevant to a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case over whether the Commerce Department properly refused to apply the finished goods exclusion to certain solar panel mounts, plaintiff-appellants China Custom Manufacturing and Greentec Engineering said in a Jan. 3 notice of supplemental authority. The CIT decisions, Columbia Aluminum Products v. U.S. and Worldwide Door Components v. U.S., excluded door threshold assemblies with aluminum extrusions from the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China as finished merchandise. The appellants said the decisions addressed arguments made in the present appeal (China Custom Manufacturing v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 22-1345).
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The case concerns CCM's scope request for its Rock-It 3.0 solar roof mountings. Made with aluminum extrusion parts, the products are used to mount solar panels on a roof and with other parts of the plaintiffs' EcoFasten Rock-It System 3.0. Since the AD/CVD orders' issue date in 2011, Commerce's interpretation of the scope of the orders has drastically evolved.
Commerce originally found that the roof mounts qualified for the finished merchandise exclusion of the orders because they required no further assembly. However, during that same year, the agency revised the way it finds whether a good qualifies as finished merchandise. The new policy found that its old interpretation of the finished merchandise exclusion could "inadvertently expand the scope of the order," so it changed the exclusion's requirements to require a good to include all the downstream products.
Two Federal Circuit cases shored up this interpretation, eventually determining that a good found to be a subassembly cannot qualify for the finished merchandise exclusion. It was under this standard that Commerce made its scope ruling now subject to litigation. However, in Columbia and Worldwide, CIT upheld Commerce's decisions to exclude the importers' door thresholds with aluminum extrusions from the scope of the orders on aluminum extrusions as finished merchandise (see 2212190051).
CCM and Greentec said that these opinions are relevant for the present appeal since they "foreclose Commerce considering subassemblies provision and finished merchandise exclusion to be mutually exclusive." The appellants added that "the decisions’ reasoning regarding the interpretation of the scope language and Commerce’s flawed reasoning about subassemblies provision is directly at odds which claims that solar panel mount assemblies not requiring further assembly or processing after importation are excluded from the Orders as 'finished merchandise.'”