Department of Commerce Releases Report on Miscellaneous Tariff Bill Petitions
April 17, 2017Morgan Barr, Office of Trade Negotiations and Analysis in ITA’s Industry & Analysis Division
On April 10, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., released the Department’s report on petitions submitted to temporarily reduce or suspend the tariffs paid on particular imported products. With this report, Commerce completes an important step in the new process outlined by Congress in The American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act (AMCA) of 2016.
When more than 2,500 petitions were submitted to the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) at the end of 2016, Commerce got to work on its review. Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service were charged with determining whether or not domestic production of the article that is the subject of each petition exists and, if so, whether a domestic producer of the article objects to the petition. Commerce also reviewed all submitted public comments. An ITA team also reviewed each petition to identify any possible overlap with antidumping duty (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders.
In addition, Commerce worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to incorporate its comments concerning any technical changes to the petitions’ article descriptions that are necessary for purposes of customs administration upon importation.
Under the AMCA, the USITC will take the Commerce report into account before making its final recommendation to Congress on whether a requested product should be included in Miscellaneous Tariff Bill (MTB) legislation. The USITC will deliver its preliminary report on MTBs to Congress in June.
The Commerce report can be found at http://trade.gov/mtbs
Additional information on the MTB process can be found at https://mtbps.usitc.gov/external/
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