Houston Chronicle by Erin Douglas Feb. 27, 2019
Gary Kilgore, senior sales manager for Salzgitter Mannesmann Stainless Tubes USA Inc., says he should be selling pipe. Instead, his time is dominated by filling out government paperwork to try to get exemptions from tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on the foreign steel his company needs to make pipe and tubing for the oil and gas industry.
After a second round of steel tariffs went into effect in June, Kilgore spent a full week and a half later that summer filing the first 100 exclusion requests — one each for every size and grade of steel the Houston manufacturing plant needed. In December, the company filed another 500, a task that took Kilgore and a temporary worker three weeks to complete.
Steve Scott, the owner of U.S. Metals, a steel distributor in Houston, has the same issue. He devoted one of his employees solely to filling out forms and filing them to get relief from the 25 percent duties his company would have to pay to import steel otherwise. “That’s pretty much all they’re doing,†Scott said.
The sea of paperwork represents another burden on hundreds of companies across Houston and Texas that are scrambling to control costs and maintain supplies of
specialty steel largely unavailable in the United States. Company executives say they might not mind the paperwork so much if it seemed to do any good.
According to government data analyzed by the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle, nearly four out of five exemption requests filed by Texas companies remain unprocessed by the U.S. Commerce Department, which has been overwhelmed by the number of applications. When the steel tariffs were first enacted last March, the Commerce Department anticipated only 4,500 requests would be filed each year.
The government has received over 66,000 exclusion requests since the tariffs started, a Commerce Department spokesperson said. Texas accounted for about one in every five of those requests in 2018, with about 90 percent of Texas applications coming from Houston.
While the government is drowning in requests, the vast majority of companies are waiting and paying. Many companies, particularly smaller ones, can’t afford to absorb the cost of the tariffs and have tried to pass some or all of it to customers. And some have lost customers unwilling to pay higher prices.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Swallowed-in-paperwork-Texas-steel-products-13647476.php
