U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued its list of fiscal 2007 payouts under the
Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000 (CDSOA) -- otherwise
known as the "Byrd Amendment."
The CDSOA instructs that all countervailing and dumping duties and tariffs levied
on imported goods be accumulated during the Government's fiscal year. A separate account
and running total is kept for each case (there are thousands). At the end
of that fiscal year, the International Trade Commission instructs CPB to pay out
that money, and in what percentage to each claimant, case-by-case.
Currently, the companies collecting are only those which successfully participated
in the litigation which resulted in that duty being assessed.
However, recent decisions by the Court of International Trade have established that the
current method of determining payout eligibility is deeply flawed and in fact unconstitutional.
The CIT has instructed the ITC to work out a new determination method, but that has not
yet been developed or announced.
After causing years of trouble in international trade and found, among other problems, to be an illegal
subsidy by the World Trade Organization, the CDSOA was finally repealed as of September 2007.
eBearing's web page dedicated to in-depth coverage of the CDSOA is here:
eBearing's CDSOA page
The following are eBearing's highly formatted tables of the CBP's reported
payouts to companies and potential payouts to the U.S. bearing industry.
The full fiscal 2007 CDSOA disbursement report is
here [ 183 pages; PDF format ].
The tables are presented in several iterations. The basic report is payout by Commerce Case Number and
description. The second shows each bearing manufacturer collecting and how much was paid (payments for
2007 were made earlier this month).
Because the CDSOA program inherently involves delays and recalculations, two more tables are often of more
interest than the first. The third table shows the grand total which could potentially
be paid out to each bearing manufacturer, if all the funds available are actually paid out.
Because duties and tariffs are frequently subject to appeal, there is often a significant portion of the
potential payout still tied up in litigation, and that is not paid out until the case is resolved
and CBP receives instructions from the ITC to release the funds for CDSOA payout.
Two final notes:
First, these tables show only the government's currently reported account balances. CBP's instructions
are to pay out only the cash which it has actually collected through the year in the various case accounts.
Unfortunately, audit reports have shown that the U.S. fails to collect a relatively large amount of
money due for tariffs and duties, either by evasion or various other means. These tables do not include those
uncollected duties, which are often collected months or years later and disbursed separately with little
formal or public notification.
Second, because government programs can be neither simple nor easy, there is yet another level
of tariff accounts, the Clearing Account Balances. Clearing Accounts are where the duties
accumulate when paid by the importer of record. CDSOA payouts are not made directly from the
Clearing Account. Instead, funds are transferred from the Clearing Account to the Special Account for payout.
Payouts are made based on liquidation instructions given by the ITC at the time each individual case is
considered resolved. Sometimes, importers get money back from the Clearing Account -- for example, if there has
been a calculation error, or they successfully argue that they paid too much -- so there is usually a difference
between the Clearing Account balance and the funds made available to the Special Account for actual CDSOA payouts.
However, because most of the bearing industry's
tariffs have been in place for many years, the successfully argued reductions are usually not significant.
NOTE : Please feel free to circulate any of this freely in a non-commercial way. There is a LOT of
work represented here. BUT ... while the information in these tables is in the public domain, the
numerous calculations and massive reformatting of that information in these tables is copyright 2007 by eBearing Inc.,
and cannot be replicated for commercial gain. And in no case may it be presented as an original work. There are
a number of web sites, particularly in China and
eastern Europe, which seem to specialize in stealing and republishing all of the articles and intellectual property
found on eBearing.com, removing the copyright notice and/or references to eBearing, and presenting it as their own.
We are currently pursuing the slow but steady international legal trek in every case and actively
working to protect our legal rights. By the way, if you actually read this entire notice, it probably
doesn't apply to you; these criminals can't read or write, they just cut and paste.
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