The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued a number of exclusions to the Section 301 China assessment program. These exclusion orders resulted in millions of dollars of duty refunds for our clients.  In order for importers to have taken advantage of these opportunities they had to file protective claims or timely claims to keep viable their rights to refunds.

Unfortunately, some importers were not able to take advantage of these granted exclusions because they did not file timely claims. Please note that we are working on a time sensitive strategy to revive such time-barred claims. If you missed filing claims on products eligible for an exclusion from Section 301 duties and would be interested in pursuing refunds back to the date their entries first became subject to 301, contact us.

Please note that this concept of private legislation is separate from the current action in the CIT to request refunds of China 301 duties paid on list 3 and list 4A goods. It is limited to only importers who could have taken advantage of exclusion orders but failed to do so in a timely fashion. The litigation in the CIT is likely to play out over the next two years.  The private legislation concept will be limited and should be concluded by the end of the year.

What importers should know:

The situation remains very fluid. We are advising you do the following:

• Know whether your imports are affected and decide what you’re going to do about it.
• If you have a question about whether your products are affected by these or other tariffs, we may be able to help. We can tell you what impact the tariffs will have on your shipments, and help you file a claim for an exclusion.
• We urge individual importers, associations and others seeking exclusions from the tariffs to Contact Us ASAP.