Request to Add Information to Record More Than 5 Months Too Late, Shrimp Petitioner Says
Petitioner American Shrimp Processors Association, a defendant-intervenor in a countervailing duty case, “strongly” objected Sep. 17 to a motion by the case’s two plaintiffs to complete the agency record by adding “‘minor corrections’ document packages” offered to the Commerce Department at verification. The untimely motion comes five months after the record was closed, the petitioner said (Industrial Pesquera Santa Priscila v. United States, CIT Consol. # 25-00025).
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The plaintiffs, exporters Industrial Pesquera Santa Priscila and Sociedad Nacional De Galapagos, brought their case opposing the final rates, calculated using partial adverse facts available, each received as a mandatory respondent in Commerce’s countervailing duty investigation on frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador (see 2502190031).
During verification, they said Commerce should have accepted corrections to the benefits their shrimp farming affiliates received under Ecuador’s vehicle tax reduction program, plus another to a benefit Sociedad Nacional De Galapagos itself received under the country’s “Currency Outflow Tax Exemption for Imported Assets and Raw Materials program” (see 2508270062).
But the two exporters only filed their motion in August -- after they had already provided an opening brief and “nearly five months after the filing of the certified administrative record index,” the American Shrimp Processors Association said.
During this period, the exporters never expressed any concern that the record was incomplete, it said. And now that they have, they haven’t provided a reasonable explanation for the delay, it claimed.
“The administrative record should not be in flux while the parties are in the middle of briefing the merits of the case,” it said.
An administrative record, the petitioner said, “does not encompass all information without regard to Commerce’s procedural rules for when and how information must be presented to the agency.” Further, it said, the document packages that the two exporters are seeking to place on the record aren’t necessary for judicial review. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit explicitly determined in Goodluck India Ltd. v. U.S. that rejected corrections offered at verifications can be reviewed without the corrections themselves on the record, it said.
This case is similar to Goodluck, it said, because the record already contains information about the “extensively examined” subsidy programs for which corrections were provided, making the corrections themselves unnecessary.