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Administrative Law

: Customs Law

House Action to Modern Export Controls

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On May 20, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed legislation that, in part, would modernize U.S. export control policy. The bill seeks to both improve national security and also permit more defense-related foreign sales. The bill also seeks to eliminate the backlog of pending State Department license applications.

Under the bill:

DDTC (the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls) would be required to have 1 licensing officer for every 1,250 applications by fiscal 2011;
DDTC would be required to have three people to review commodity jurisdiction requests;
Commodity jurisdiction decisions would need to be published on the internet;
A performance goal of 60 days to process license applications, and 30 days to process applications for close allies would be established.

These, and the other changes included in the bill, are valuable efforts at facilitating export trade in defense articles. In particular, the publication of commodity jurisdiction determinations will give exporters a far better basis on which to engage in rational internal decision making on whether a license is necessary. That will ultimately result in cost savings and fewer delays in corporate sales activity. Of course, the associated risk is that exporters making independent jurisdiction decisions might get it wrong even when relying on similar DDTC decisions.

Full post as published by Customs Law on May 26, 2009 (boomark / email).