Yesterday the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls issued a notice in the Federal Register seeking public comment on Form DS-4076. This form is the one proposed by DDTC for mandatory filing of Commodity Jurisdiction (“CJ”) requests with the agency via D-Trade, its electronic filing system. The announcement led some to speculate breathlessly that the adoption of the new mandatory CJ form is just around the corner.

Actually, as long as this form has been kicking around at DDTC, the agency has been publishing the same request for comments on the form. Here is an almost identical notice issued in 2005. So I’m not sure much can be inferred from yesterday’s Federal Register notice.

And then there’s this. The form on which DDTC is supposedly seeking comment is not printed with the notice and has been “disappeared” from the DDTC website. The link to the form on the “Future Enhancements” page no longer functions and leads instead to a “page not found” error page. Another link was working yesterday and would bring up the form but today it brings up a “page not found” error page as well. And a Google search of the DDTC site shows that the form isn’t hiding anywhere else on the website. You can, however, view a copy that Google has kept in its cache here.

The form seems unchanged from previous versions of the proposed CJ form. In general, it asks for much more information than is required under the current CJ guidelines. And then, the proposed form still contains a bitter pill for applicants to swallow. It asks whether the item subject to the CJ has ever been exported before. In other words, if you’ve exported something, believing it not to be USML, the result of a CJ request may include a directed disclosure.

UPDATE: Doug Jacobson found on the DDTC site what looks to be a new version of the DS-4076 here. I don’t see any links to this version anywhere on the DDTC site and the only links on the site purporting to go to form DS-4076 remain broken and don’t point towards this revised form of the DS-4076. The filing instructions at the end of this version of the DS-4076 form rather oddly provide for electronic uploading of the form outside the D-Trade system and direct the electronic filer to yet another broken link.

Permalink


Copyright © 2009 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)