Antidumping / Countervailing Duty Compliance
Are your goods properly classified and do you know for sure who manufactured them? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you could become the victim of stepped-up Customs and Border Protection (CBP) enforcement of unfair trade practices.
Congress has given Customs additional power to combat antidumping / countervailing (AD/CVD) duty evasion. Dumping occurs when a shipper sells goods below the cost of production or below the prices they would charge for that product in their own country. Countervailing duties are when a foreign government provides assistance or subsidies to exporters to ship to the United States at below market prices.
Two hot areas of AD/CVD are Canadian softwood lumber, which has already seen an imposition of additional duties, and foreign steel, a topic of the current administration at the G-20 meetings in Hamburg earlier in July.
Between the International Trade Administration and the Department of Commerce, they determine if injury is taking place and if so, what the additional duties are that must be added, either at an exporter level or a country-wide level. Avoiding these duties, either through transshipment (falsely declaring of the country of origin) or evasion is an expensive proposition and one that will land an importer in both civil and criminal trouble with the U.S. government.
KCarlton can help before you place that order by checking the classification, country of origin and whether or not there are antidumping duties on the product you plan to import and advise accordingly.