U.S. Customs and Border Protection soon will deploy informed compliance measures to guide the trade community in complying with recently imposed safeguard tariffs.
Thomas Jesukiewicz, field director of the CBP’s Long Beach, Calif., office, made the announcement during the agency’s 2018 Trade Symposium in Atlanta last Wednesday. He urged the importing community to closely examine customs valuation in the context of safeguard duties that recently took effect.
“Coming up very soon, my office and another office will be addressing one of the safeguards with [a Center of Excellence and Expertise,] going out and starting to provide informed compliance and getting you ready,” he said.
He added that CBP auditors are looking for goods overlapping both safeguard duties and antidumping/countervailing duty orders.
“If you’re already paying dumping or if you’re in an area of dumping and you get hit with a safeguard, your risk has just ramped up quite a bit,” Jesukiewicz said. “We adjust our risk models and who we’re going to visit.”
CBP regulatory auditors will look at the customs valuation and make sure “controls” are in place as the safeguards are carried out, Jesukiewicz said.
“These things are complex,” he said. “We want you to be able to follow it right. [If you’re one of] the big players that are involved and your merchandise is involved in these areas of safeguards, expect informed compliance to keep coming, either through a site visit or a pamphlet that would come to you first, and then depending on how your transactions go that are going to be monitored, you may be … asked through either a [CBP Form] 28 or an audit if there seems to be a shift or a change away from the tariff on the merchandise that you’re bringing in.”
Jesukiewicz said that when the Trump administration puts out a safeguard, it immediately wants to know what’s being done to ensure enforcement.