International Trade Blog

As a former defense company employee, I remember when our company would schedule a guided tour for many of our client visitors or foreign national contract employees.

Most employees would not mind being the babysitter tour guide, as we were referred to, but occasionally there were those who felt it wasn’t their job to escort others and that the current security procedures in place were sufficient enough to keep visitors from going into unauthorized areas.

After briefing those skeptical employees on the security and deemed export rules, they still refused to acknowledge the importance of protecting our technology and continued to believe that the deemed export rules were nothing more than someone at our firm trying to hype their position to justify their existence at the company. I’m sure many of you out there know people like this at your companies or have run across those who think this way.

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Ask anyone on the street to define "export," and you'll almost certainly get an answer, and it will probably be accurate (but not complete). Read more at Surprise! You May Be an Exporter Without Even Knowing It.

Ask those same people to define "reexport," and you're bound to get some interesting (and confusing) answers. Really, go try it. It's an interesting way to spend your lunch hour.

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In a previous blog post, I discussed what I had learned by attending a seminar cosponsored by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and the Minnesota Trade Office. I described how to find an item’s Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) on the Commerce Control List (CCL).

In today’s blog post, I will describe the next step in the process: How to use the Commerce Country Chart to determine if an export license is required based on the reasons for control.

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It may seem easy to become an exporter—particularly since the internet knows no borders—but the scope of things exporters need to be aware of is very broad.

To start with, companies need to identify foreign markets for their products, determine the best method for selling those goods, and make sure they're going to get paid.

They also need to be aware of potential export compliance issues. And to do that, they need to know which U.S. government agency has jurisdiction over their goods and what set of export regulations apply. Without enough information, it can quickly get confusing.

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You’ve probably known since grade school that Puerto Rico is not a state. But do you know what it is?

It’s an unincorporated United States territory in the Caribbean Sea made up of a main island plus several smaller islands with a population of about 3.5 million people.

But what does it mean to be an unincorporated U.S. territory?

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The Destination Control Statement is a legal statement required by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) stating that the goods you are exporting are destined to the country indicated in all the shipping documents. It is a necessary legal boundary clarifying what happens to shipments, and it essentially states that the buyer isn’t going to take the goods and forward them to another country.

Until recently, the statement required by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) under the EAR was different than the statement required by the State Department under the ITAR. That changed in November 2016 after both agencies published notices in the Federal Register of a single, harmonized statement that can be used by exporters regardless if their goods fall under the jurisdiction of BIS or State.

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Wishing something were true doesn’t make it true.

This simple fact that some exporters ignore the truth came into focus for me at one of the two-day Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) export control seminars held across the country. I heard a licensing officer tell an interesting story about “wishing it were so,” and I want to share a paraphrased version of what he said:

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Are you afraid to export goods that require a license? If so, you’re not alone. I’ve talked with exporters who are hesitant to export goods because they know the process would require an export license, and they don’t know how to begin to apply for one.

The good news for them (and for all exporters) is that the process of applying for an export license is not so bad at all. In this article, we’ll focus on the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Simplified Network Application Process Redesign (SNAP-R) process for applying for an export license.

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You all know about the three academic R’s, of Reading wRiting and aRithmetic. But are you familiar with the three R's of export compliance: the FTR, the EAR and the ITAR?

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One of the more frustrating parts of this job is seeing the costly mistakes small and midsize exporters make when it comes to export compliance.

Because they aren’t “one of the big guys,” some U.S. companies think export compliance regulations don't apply to them (or that they won’t get caught if they don’t follow the regs). Instead, they ignore the regulations, or they breeze through their company’s compliance process and neglect to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.

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