Commerce Right to Refuse to Aggregate CBP Data for Tire Exporter, US Says
Responding to an exporter’s comments on remand results (see 2412230074), the government said Feb. 3 that the Commerce Department fully complied with a second remand order by the Court of International Trade (see 2406270043). The trade court had ordered it to further explain its selection of a second mandatory respondent in a separate rate review on passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China (YC Rubber Co. (North America) v. U.S., CIT # 19-00069).
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After the department’s decision to choose only one mandatory respondent for its review was sent back by Court of International Trade Judge Mark Barnett, Commerce asked a number of nonselected respondents to participate. Most refused, citing the roughly six years that had passed since the review was first initiated; a second mandatory respondent was finally secured in exporter Kenda Rubber (see 2402060054). As a result, Commerce decided to revoke the other respondents’ separate rate statuses and assign them the China-wide rate of 87.99% (see 2410290027).
The nonselected exporters, led by YC Rubber, argued in response that Kenda should have been the first exporter Commerce looked to when selecting a second mandatory respondent, not one of the last (see 2412230074). They claimed Commerce's failure to aggregate CBP entry data resulted in it determining that Kenda was a smaller exporter than the others.
But Commerce didn’t make the compilation errors that YC Rubber claimed it had, the U.S. said in its Feb. 3 brief.
It said the department followed its usual practice of aggregating CBP entry data for entries from companies whose names have minor differences. But the “addition of a word” to one name in the data wasn't considered a “minor variation,” the U.S. said, redacting the exact word from the public version of its brief.
“Minor variations” are “differences like the omission of periods in abbreviations or omissions of corporate abbreviations,” it said.
It also addressed issues raised by another exporter, ITG Voma, which filed separately. Voma claimed the department shouldn’t have selected respondents using all imports entered during the period of review instead of only those that were suspended.
But the court has already sustained Commerce’s decision to look to total imports as consistent with statute, the U.S. said.
And it said the department acted reasonably and within its authority when it rejected the nonselected respondents’ withdrawal requests after the court forced it to hear them in its first remand order.
“Commerce found that the additional arguments provided by Mayrun, Hengyu, and Windrun to grant their untimely withdrawal requests were unpersuasive,” it said.