Tariff policy has been changing so rapidly that CBP hasn't been able to dot all the i's and cross the t's before entries are subject to the new rules, and that's putting brokers in limbo at times, the customs committee chair for the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America told an audience of brokers at NCBFAA's national conference this week.
Sandy Langford-Coty, a broker at A.N. Deringer, said with energy categories for Canadian goods under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs, the tariff classifications weren't always clear at the time the action went into effect. "So they said, 'Pick your tariffs.' Well, you picked a couple, that maybe [Customs] didn't pick, and now we're getting rejects, but I haven't paid my entry yet. It's not due for another whatever, 10 days. They can't accept my check for the difference, but it's due now."
She added: "What do I do? Does anyone know? If you do, let me know. But we're getting different direction from the center and for the folks we're sending the check to. So where does this limbo end?"
Langford-Coty said an ongoing hassle is the problem of new aluminum and steel derivative products outside the core chapters for those metals. For those products, importers are supposed to report two values: one for the product as a whole, and one for the metal content in the product. Except some of the products don't actually have any metal content -- or the metal content is domestic, and therefore, not taxable.
"The derivative split value is hell. Honestly, they just threw a solution out there, because the system can't handle it, and now we have these dual lines processing causing all kinds of issues," she said.
She added, "You, as an auditor, have no idea whether that line without the 99 number was really supposed to be a line that's part of a split, or is it really just a derivative that has no [metal content]? So then you've got to look at documents."
Adding another complication is the fact that some of these derivatives may have only triggered tariff liability at the date of export, if they were leaving a foreign-trade zone or bonded warehouse. But the date of export isn't one of the data lines that's on the entry form. Langford-Coty said some regions aren't accepting export dates that preceded the beginning of the duty collection. "I think Customs has to help us by giving us actual dates on our entry," she said.
Ralph De La Rosa, an NCBFAA board member and president of Imperial Freight Brokers, said one aspect of the aluminum derivative enforcement has been softened. In CBP's FAQ on the aluminum derivatives, it originally said "that you have an aluminum derivative product, and you did not know the country of smelting, smelt and cast, that you would need to report Russia. And so you would have to pay 200% duty."
"We pushed back. And for now -- big asterisk -- they're saying, 'Okay, no, until we figure out what we're doing, you don't need to report for Russia. You can report, you know, any country other than the U.S. as country of smelt and cast again.'"
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