Nucor Seeks Higher AD Rates Over Ministerial Errors in Review of Steel Pipes and Tubes

Nucor Tubular Products launched a lawsuit at the Court of International Trade seeking higher dumping rates for the respondents in an antidumping review based on calculation errors committed by the Commerce Department (Nucor Tubular Products Inc. v. United States, CIT #21-00543).

The case concerns an administrative review of the antidumping duty order on heavy walled rectangular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Mexico covering entries in 2019, wherein Commerce tapped Maquilacero and Productos Laminados de Monterrey (Prolamsa) as the mandatory respondents. The agency calculated Maquilacero's normal value by using programming language that relied on numbers "unrelated to Maquilacero's costs or questionnaire responses for a subset of the Maquilacero's sales," the complaint said.

Nucor alerted Commerce about this error to no avail, with the agency merely dismissing the raised grievance as untimely. Commerce even acknowledged that it incorrectly assigned sequential values, as opposed to using Maquilacero's reported quarterly hot-rolled coil price data in certain cases in the review. But Commerce said that the cost information was "unnecessary to the ultimate calculation," removing the cost language from the program. "However, Commerce did not remove other interconnected programming, thereby exacerbating the error in the preliminary determination," the complaint said.

Prolamsa's calculations also held errors. Commerce originally calculated Prolamsa's home market adjustments in Mexican pesos. The agency then revised the respondent's home market prices and converted them, along with adjustments and expenses, to U.S. dollars using different formulas than those in the preliminary results. These revisions held errors that did not exist in the preliminary results, the complaint said.

Commerce said Nucor's ministerial error allegations for both Maquilacero and Prolamsa calculations were untimely. These denials were "arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, not supported by substantial evidence, and [were] otherwise not in accordance with law," the complaint said.