Mattress Exporter Says Alleged 'Anomalies' in CEP Were Tiny in Nature
Arguing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Oct. 3 that the Commerce Department was right to exclude its in-transit mattresses from its affiliated importer’s constructed export price, exporter PT. Zinus Global Indonesia said petitioners “overstate their case” that data anomalies rendered the department’s choice unreasonable (PT. Zinus Global Indonesia v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 25-1674).
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The Court of International Trade sustained the final determination in the relevant antidumping duty investigation on Indonesian-origin mattresses in February (see 2502180056). Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves previously remanded the determination twice to have Commerce properly explain why it was including the in-transit mattresses in the calculation; Commerce reversed course in its third attempt.
Notably, the importer’s Indonesian inventory itself had to be constructed during the investigation. During the investigation period, Zinus U.S. purchased mattresses from a number of countries and sold them first-in-first-out, not tracking the individual mattresses’ actual countries of origin.
Petitioners led by Brooklyn Bedding appealed to CAFC (see 2506250052), arguing again that the construction resulted in a figure that meant importer Zinus U.S. hadn’t had enough domestic inventory for all the sales it made during the investigation period.
But “absent from their discussions is any reference to the overall size of Zinus’ U.S. inventory and sales,” Zinus Global said in its Oct. 3 filing.
It said the claimed anomalies were the equivalent of 0.16% of its sales from inventory. It called that a “truly insignificant quantity that hardly rises to the level of a rounding error.”
All of the “claimed anomalies” also had other plausible explanations, it said. For example, it said, it explained in one of its questionnaire responses that mattresses would sometimes be added to Zinus’ inventory due to, for example, “inventory stock-taking differences.” And the importer even had a particular account that “mostly related to human data entry errors,” it said.
The petitioners raise a factual challenge to the final determination, it observed, so they face the high bar of the substantial evidence standard. It noted that the determination was the result of an investigation, two remands and three CIT opinions, making it already “fully vetted.”
Zinus Global also said that Commerce hadn’t been required to verify data on Zinus’ inventory it had gathered after the second remand. It added that the petitioners hadn’t requested verification at the time, so the argument should be waived.
Commerce has broad discretion to set its own verification procedures, it said. It said that the data the department gathered after the remand was “a relatively small set.” And it argued that “verification is a spot check” -- Commerce doesn’t have to check every piece of data.