WASHINGTON: On February 24, 2016, President Obama signed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 (“the Act”) into law. The president hailed the Act as a way to strengthen U.S. trade enforcement, combat evasion of enforcement actions, and improve transparency, accountability, and coordination in enforcement efforts.
Despite the continued acrimony in Congress, lawmakers in both houses spent the last half of 2015 working on a compromise version of the Act to combine elements of separate House and Senate bills. Among other things, the Act provides United States Customs & Border Protection (CBP) with increased enforcement tools to strengthen the agency’s ability to facilitate trade and ensure compliance. The law formalizes CBP’s new Centers of Excellence and Expertise structure, while modernizing regulatory provisions on duty drawback and the importation of container residue.
The Act also provides significant increased enforcement tools to CBP for intellectual property protections and heightened due process procedures for the enforcement of trade remedy orders, including timelines for CBP to act on evasion of antidumping and countervailing duty orders and the potential for judicial review. We have summarized below some of the specific areas that will have a more immediate impact on importers.
