US, Petitioner Say Exporter Trying to Add New Factual Information to Record
Opposing Thai tire exporter Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations' motion to amend the record, the U.S. and petitioner United Steel, Paper and Forestry each said March 18 that the documents Bridgestone sought to include were untimely and potentially being misrepresented (Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations v. United States, CIT # 24-00263).
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The documents, they said, were “new factual information” that the mandatory respondent hadn’t offered the department until verification. And some of them didn’t appear to be the same ones Commerce officials viewed during their on-site visit, they claimed.
Bridgestone filed its motion Feb. 25, seeking to add to the record several documents -- customer-specific rebate information and its “Accounts Receivable” (AR) reports -- that it said it offered Commerce at verification. It said Commerce’s verification officials hadn’t taken some of the documents and hadn’t included others in their verification report. The department had then applied total adverse facts available to the exporter because that information was missing, the exporter claimed.
Regarding the customer-specific rebate information, the parties provided different descriptions of events that occurred during verification.
In particular, Bridgestone said that Commerce officials asked for U.S. “customer-specific rebate information, sorted largest to smallest,” while the U.S. and petitioner said the department’s officials sought specifically “the smallest and largest total values of each type of rebate on a per-customer basis.”
The parties all said -- the petitioner and U.S. in their March 18 briefs, and the exporter in its administrative rebuttal brief -- that Bridgestone provided the officials information on “total rebates by month and customer.” The U.S. described the information as a “report generated from Bridgestone’s rebate tracking system.” Commerce then included it in a confidential exhibit in its verification summary.
“While it may have been possible to derive the requested information from the report, the report itself did not provide the requested information,” the U.S. said.
Bridgestone also claims that the Commerce officials saw a “pivot table” that it seeks to have put on the record. It said that Commerce’s sales verification summary also includes “sample information” of its rebate tracking information showing “the largest and smallest amounts pertaining to a specific rebate.” Commerce could only have selected that sample data if its verification officials had seen Bridgestone’s pivot table, it argued.
The U.S. said that, “[w]hile Commerce officials viewed a summary table within the rebate report system, they did not view the pivot table that Bridgestone is now attempting to add to the record.”
The petitioner, meanwhile, said that, “based on a comparison” of the verification summary exhibit and the document Bridgestone wanted placed on the record, it was “unclear” what Bridgestone actually offered during verification.
“Plaintiff assumes that Commerce ‘must have reviewed the pivot table in order to select the sample documentation included in the verification exhibit,’” it said. “But a litigant cannot rely on speculative grounds to prevail on a motion to complete or supplement the record.”
Regarding the AR reports, meanwhile, Bridgestone said Commerce’s on-site verifier “misunderstood” the reports' purpose. This, “[f]or reasons that remain unclear,” prompted the verifier to decline them upon proffer, it said. The department then “used the absence of this document from the record as the basis to claim the agency was unable to verify the accuracy and completeness of Bridgestone’s sales database and accounting systems,” it claimed.
The U.S. said in turn that Bridgestone told the department in a supplemental questionnaire that it made sales to affiliates, but that the exporter didn’t disclose the particular sales.
At verification, Commerce officials asked for a reconciliation of Bridgstone’s AR reports for sales to certain affiliates, the government said. But the reports the officials received didn’t include all of the affiliates, and “Bridgestone company officials were unable to contact the personnel who had created the report for Commerce,” it claimed.
Overall, the U.S. said that the application of total AFA was instead the result of “numerous undisclosed discrepancies and errors, all of which -- with the exception of certain errors Commerce found with regard to Bridgestone’s rebates in the U.S. market -- were not properly disclosed to Commerce as items for correction.” And the information Bridgestone sought to provide Commerce during verification was “new factual information” that should have been offered earlier, it said.
United Steel, Paper and Forestry added that Commerce doesn’t have to include all of the documents it viewed during verification to the record, citing the 1997 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case Micron Tech. v. United States. It called this "fatal" to Bridgestone's motion.