The Office of Foreign Assets Control soon will make a range of changes to its reporting, procedures and penalties regulations, including one that will require electronic-only filings of certain documents and others that will add or clarify reporting requirements for certain blocked property or rejected transactions. The agency also clarified its definitions for “transaction” and “U.S. persons” after public commenters told OFAC they were unclear, clarified the types of information that must be reported for rejected transitions, and more.
Ian Cohen
Ian Cohen, Deputy Managing Editor, is a reporter with Export Compliance Daily and its sister publications International Trade Today and Trade Law Daily, where he covers export controls, sanctions and international trade issues. He previously worked as a local government reporter in South Florida. Ian graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Florida in 2017 and lives in Washington, D.C. He joined the staff of Warren Communications News in 2019.
The U.S. will struggle to compete technologically with China unless it continues to loosen trade barriers around sensitive technologies for a broader range of allies outside just the U.K. and Australia, Mike Gallagher, a former member of Congress, said this week.
Maurel & Prom received a specific license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control that authorizes certain activities involving Venezuela’s state-owned energy company Petroleos de Venezuela, the Paris-headquartered oil company announced May 6.
Senate Democrats are urging the Treasury Department to quickly finalize a proposed rule that could make investment advisers subject to more sanctions-related compliance requirements, adding that the agency should also require advisers to follow rigorous due diligence requirements that currently apply to large banks. But financial industry organizations said Treasury should revise the proposal because investment advisers are already covered by existing anti-money laundering laws and aren’t the right target for new compliance guardrails.
Companies should expect the U.S. to soon expand the statute of limitations for certain export control violations to align with a similar extension for sanctions violations, a law firm said.
The U.S. should rethink its export control enforcement efforts by creating an ecosystem of preapproved, trusted sellers and logistics providers instead of blacklists of bad actors, a researcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report this month. The report said some of those companies would be required to earn an export compliance certification, use digital waybills to reduce chances of documentation fraud and help trace sensitive exports, and submit monthly reports to the Bureau of Industry and Security about suspicious consignments.
The Commerce Department should start preparing export controls for dual-use artificial intelligence models, which could prevent those models from being used to make biosecurity weapons or skirt U.S. export restrictions on advanced semiconductors, researchers told the agency in comments released this month. But technology companies and industry groups warned the U.S. against overbroad controls, which they said could hurt American AI innovation.
Russia is still able to buy semiconductors for its war effort -- especially from China -- despite Western sanctions and export controls, a semiconductor policy researcher said in a new report this month. Although the restrictions are forcing Russia to pay almost double for some chips and require Russian supply chain managers to constantly find new supply lines, the report said Chinese suppliers are increasingly filling the market gap left by companies in the U.S. and elsewhere who are adhering to the export restrictions.
The Bureau of Industry and Security recently met with a group of industry and university officials to hear about challenges plaguing export compliance professionals, including problems doing due diligence on foreign parties, lengthy timelines for export license applications and more.
U.S. companies should expect more retaliation from China if the Bureau of Industry and Security adds more major Chinese technology firms to its Entity List this year, Paul Trulio, a China and technology policy expert, said during an event last week hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Trulio and other panelists also said it’s unclear exactly how a possible second Trump administration may tweak U.S. export control policy toward Beijing, but they said it’s possible former President Donald Trump, if reelected, could significantly increase restrictions on Chinese firms through potential financial sanctions and may pressure allies to do the same.