Since President Obama enacted the US Trade Enforcement and Facilitation Act (TEFA) of 2015 (discussed in this blog post back in March), any business who imports goods should have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on if and how the US Customs and Border Protection would ramp up enforcement.
A recent paper by Akin Gump provides an excellent summary of several activities and trends on this front that will be of great interest to supply chain and procurement managers in the USA, including:
- New enforcement actions: the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have issued detention orders (the first since 2000), holding up goods from import
- New petitions are being filed on goods alleged to be made with slave labor
- A new task force has been created in CBP to focus on enforcement of TEFA
Thanks to Akin Gump for this contribution