Kirti Reddy Quoted in New York Times Article About Tariff Collection Process
Kirti Reddy, a Quarles & Brady partner and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, shared her perspective in a New York Times article about how the new tariffs on products from Canada, Mexico and China could impact the process of collecting import duties.
Reddy, who is a member of the firm’s Health & Life Sciences Practice Group and also co-leads its Government Enforcement Defense and Investigations team, explained why the new tariffs could lead some importers to make fraudulent claims about the values of their good.
An excerpt:
In addition, policing importers for tariff evasion will now become a much bigger task for Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice. Some importers may try to avoid tariffs by understating the cost of goods in customs declarations or by falsely claiming they were imported from countries not subject to tariffs.
“The greater the breadth and severity of these new tariffs, the greater the likelihood that at least some potential importers may want to misrepresent the value or the origin of their goods,” said Kirti Vaidya Reddy, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the law firm Quarles.
If the government finds that an importer has not paid duties, customs officials are likely to demand that the importer pay what is owed and a penalty that can double or even triple the amount due.
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