The U.S. brought a customs penalty suit against importer E-Dong U.S.A. for failure to pay federal excise tax on entries of soju bottles from South Korea. Filing a complaint March 28 at the Court of International Trade, the government said that the company entered the soju, a Korean spirit, via "material or false statement" by failing to reference any of the owed excise tax (U.S. v. E-Dong, U.S.A., CIT # 24-00066).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The following lawsuit was recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. defended the Commerce Department before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on March 18 regarding a number of decisions it made during its 13th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China, including its selection of two Malaysian exporters as surrogates over a respondent’s opposition (Carbon Activated Tianjin Co., Ltd. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-2413).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated March 15-18 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated March 15 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
In a long-delayed motion for summary judgment in a case that began in 2018, a Swiss watch importer argued that CBP had relied on the wrong definitions of "watch crystal” and “watch case” when it misclassified its entries at a higher duty rate (Ildico Inc. v. U.S., CIT #s 18-00136, -00076).
The Court of International Trade on March 11 granted importer Magid Glove & Safety Manufacturing Co.'s motion to voluntarily dismiss 12 of its customs suits. The voluntary dismissal bid comes after the importer lost a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case on the classification of its textile gloves with a plastic coating on the palm and fingers (see 2312060028). The appellate court said the gloves are classified as gloves under Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading 6116, not as articles of plastics under heading 3926 (Magid Glove & Safety Manufacturing Co v. U.S., CIT # 16-00036, -00040, -00044, -00149, -00151, -00152, -00153, -00166, 17-00001, -00003, -00004 and -00098).
Ford Motor Company agreed to pay $365 million to settle allegations that it knowingly undervalued hundreds of thousands of cargo vans, DOJ announced. The settlement comes five years after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that CBP properly classified Ford's Transit Connect vehicles as cargo vans, dutiable at 25%, and not as passenger vans, dutiable at 2.5%.