When will importers pay both tariffs?

July 24, 2015

With the countervailing duty (CV) on a temporary hiatus, one big tariff question remains: When will U.S. Customs and Border Protection begin to collect both the CV and the anti-dumping (AD) duties on passenger and light truck tires imported from China?

The answer, from the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC): by the second week of August.

The DOC awaits the formal receipt of the U.S. International Trade Commission’s (ITC’s) decision to uphold the tariffs. (It’s due Monday, July 27, 2015.) Once it’s received DOC will prepare an order for publication in the Federal Register. Like it’s been in every other step of this process, the publication in the Federal Register is what triggers action. In this instance, the action will be for CBP to collect both the CV and AD duties for the next five years.

Look for that notice in an early August edition of the Federal Register.

A DOC spokesman also puts to bed the thought that the preliminary AD tariff will expire, like the CV tariff did, before the final order is published. Statutes require CV investigations to move at a faster pace, and thus “it’s not uncommon at all” for preliminary CV orders to lapse before the final orders are made. That won’t happen with the AD, the spokesman said, because the preliminary orders are still current, and they’ve already been reinforced by the final rulings of the DOC and ITC.

Latest in Consumer Tires