Commerce Accepts Ministerial Errors on Remand at CIT, Raises AD Rates on Steel Pipes and Tubes
The Commerce Department accepted ministerial errors originally rejected as untimely in an antidumping duty proceeding on remand at the Court of International Trade, raising the dumping rates for the two respondents should the remand results be sustained. Commerce corrected errors in respondent Prolamsa's currency conversion and respondent Maquilacero's quarterly cost methodology in the 2018-19 administrative review of the AD order on heavy walled rectangular welded steel pipes and tubes from Mexico, causing their AD rates to rise from zero percent to 2.11% for Prolamsa and to 3.48% for Maquilacero (Nucor Tubular Products v. United States, CIT # 21-00543).
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AD petitioner Nucor Corp. raised the ministerial errors during the proceeding, though Commerce rejected them as untimely since they were discoverable earlier in the proceeding. The trade court remanded Commerce's rejection (see 2301180039).
Nucor said Commerce made inadvertent errors in Prolamsa's final calculations, which lowered the company's home market net price. The company specifically said the agency converted home market price fields to U.S. dollars in the SAS margin program but failed to do so for home market packing costs and home market inventory carrying costs. Commerce also converted home market net price a second time to USD, leading to an errant calculation of foreign unit price in dollars. Nucor requested that the foreign unit price in dollars be revised to exclude the double conversion.
The agency dropped the double conversion on remand, converting home market packing costs and home market inventory carrying costs to USD before calculating home market net price and correcting the foreign unit price.
Nucor also said Commerce erroneously included Maquilacero's sales before the period of review in its cost of production calculation for goods sold but not produced. "To correct the error described above, for these final results of redetermination, we revised our programming language to limit the quarters under consideration to only those within the POR," the agency said.