U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued instructions on requesting "new" retroactive benefits1 for textiles and apparel co-produced in countries that joined the Dominican Republic - Central America - U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) on different dates, currently El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.
CBP CROSS Rulings
CBP issues binding advance rulings in connection with the importation of merchandise into the United States. They issue the rulings to give the trade community transparency of how CBP will treat a prospective import or carrier transaction. Common rulings include the tariff classification, country of origin, or free trade agreement applicability of merchandise, among other things. These rulings are available in CBP's Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) database.
American Shipper reports that U.S. industry groups have lined up to attack S. 295, which calls for a 27.5% tax on imports from China. According to the article, the purpose of the bill is to pressure China to change its currency policy. (ShippersNewsWire, dated 09/25/06, www.americanshipper.com )
CBP has issued administrative messages on a number of antidumping (AD) and countervailing (CV) duty actions, many of which (marked by an * in the action column) were previously published in the Federal Register by the International Trade Administration (ITA) and summarized in International Trade Today.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued an ABI administrative message advising the trade on the ABI system requirements needed to file a Mexican cement import license. The administrative message also briefly covers the requirements for a Mexican export license.
CBP has posted to its Web site a notice announcing a "weekly" special import quota of 23,276,125 kg for upland cotton purchased not later than December 26, 2006 and entered under HTS 9903.52.25. The quota period is September 28, 2006 through March 26, 2007; the opening date is September 28, 2006 at 1:00 p.m. EDT, or its equivalent in other time zones.
The National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAA) held its annual Government Affairs Conference on September 18-19, 2006 in Washington, D.C., during which officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as well as staff members from Congress, spoke. Highlights of their remarks include the following:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued a final rule, effective October 16, 2006, that will finalize, without change, a 2003 interim rule that added a new 19 CFR 103.35 on the disclosure procedures CBP follows when Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are submitted concerning commercial information provided by a business submitter.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued its weekly tariff rate quota (TRQ)/tariff preference level (TPL) commodity report as of September 18, 2006. This report includes TRQs on various products such as beef, tuna, sugar, dairy products, peanuts, cotton, cocoa powder, tobacco, certain BFTA, CAFTA-DR, JFTA, MFTA, NAFTA, SFTA, UAFTA (AFTA) and UCFTA (Chile FTA) non-textile TRQs, etc. Each report also includes the AGOA, ATPDEA, BFTA, CAFTA-DR, CBTPA, MFTA, NAFTA, SFTA, and UCFTA (Chile FTA) TPLs and TRQs for qualifying apparel and/or other textile articles, the TRQs on worsted wool fabrics, etc. (CBP's weekly TRQ/TPL commodity report, dated 09/18/06, available at http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/import/textiles_and_quotas/commodity/)
The Court of International Trade has issued a decision in the case Michael Simon Design, Inc. v. U.S. which upholds the importer's view that sweaters with certain Christmas or Halloween motifs are classified as "festive articles" in Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) 9505 (duty- and quota-free).
In the September 13, 2006 issue of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Bulletin (CBP Bulletin) (Vol. 40, No. 38), CBP published a notice proposing to revoke a ruling and treatment as follows: