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Earlier in March, I wrote a post about Ford Motor Company’s tariff engineering of importing “passenger vans” at 2.5% and then converting the “passenger vans” to cargo vans. This tariff engineering allowed Ford to pay the 2.5% for passenger vans instead of 25% for cargo vans.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the Court of International Trade’s holding and found that slight modifications to a vehicle so that it would not get the 25% duty on cargo trucks was deceptive and reversed the CIT’s holding that modifications done to a vehicle after importation into the US was irrelevant.

This new ruling will have a big impact on a lot of existing classifications.

The full ruling can be found at the link below:

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/18-1018.Opinion.6-7-2019.pdf

If you have a ruling, classification or tariff engineering questions, contact experienced trade law attorney David Hsu at 832-896-6288 or by email at attorney.dave@yahoo.com or dh@gjatradelaw.com.