Court Opinion

ID: 9494927
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:50:23.929472+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:42.792976
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. While I share the majority’s concern about the lengthy delays in the investigation of this case, I would not reverse the trial court’s decision that, under all the circumstances, the delay was not shown to be unreasonable.
By statute, Customs is accorded broad discretion to obtain extensions for up to four years to liquidate entries. 19 U.S.C. § 1504(b). An extension need not be applied for; rather, Customs may unilaterally obtain extensions of the one-year statutory liquidation period if “the information *1344needed for the proper appraisement or classification of the merchandise, or for insuring compliance with applicable law, is not available to the Customs Service” or if the importer requests the extension. This court has made clear that Customs enjoys very broad discretion in determining whether to seek extensions as long as the total pre-liquidation period does not exceed four years. See St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. United States, 6 F.3d 763, 767-68 (Fed.Cir.1993) (discussing in detail the statutory and regulatory design for obtaining extensions of liquidation). This court set out the governing standard in St. Paul, the leading decision on this point:
Customs may, for statutory purposes and with the requisite notice, employ up to four years to effect liquidation so long as the extensions it grants are not abusive of its discretionary authority. Such an abuse of discretionary authority may arise only when an extension is granted even following elimination of all possible grounds for such an extension. There is, in sum, a narrow limitation on Customs’ discretion to extend the period of liquidation.
6 F.3d at 768.
The Court of International Trade in this case held a three-day trial and subsequently wrote a lengthy opinion in which it analyzed in detail the circumstances surrounding the extensions obtained by Customs in this case. For reasons set forth in its opinion, the court concluded that Ford had not met its burden of showing that the amount of time consumed by the investigation was unreasonable; the court therefore held that this case did not fall within the “narrow limitation” on Customs’ discretion to obtain extensions of the time for liquidating the subject entries.
The trial court examined the conduct of the two agents who were principally responsible for the investigation during the period in which the three extensions were obtained. With respect to the period August 1986 through November 1987, when the investigation was assigned to Agent Fritz, the trial court noted that “there was activity on the case from the time the case was assigned to Fritz in August 1986 at least through March 4, 1987, when Fritz interviewed Art Trussell, the former Louisville Port Director.” The fact that there was no apparent activity on the case for the following eight months, the court explained, “does not show the inactivity was necessarily unreasonable.” Rather, the court noted that the evidence showed that Agent Fritz “had other commitments and time constraints which limited his ability to work on the case,” including being assigned to other investigations, working as the sole staff at the new Bowling Green office for a 30-day period, and being out on sick leave at the time the investigation was transferred. Based on the evidence adduced at trial, the court concluded that “the time it took Fritz to conduct the Ford investigation, given Fritz’s overlapping obligations, cannot be found by this Court to be unreasonable.”
The court likewise examined the period between November 1987 and October 1988, when the third extension was obtained. During that period, Agent Kyle was in charge of the investigation. Again, based on the evidence at trial, the court found that the period of delay was not unreasonable. During that period, the court noted, Agent Kyle was waiting for information from another Customs agent, and he also needed to interview four or five witnesses. It was not unreasonable that Agent Kyle failed to conduct those interviews earlier, the court concluded, “as *1345he had a heavy caseload and had numerous responsibilities in connection with setting up the Bowling Green office during the time in which he was assigned to the case.”
The question whether Ford satisfied its burden of establishing that the particular periods of delay were unreasonable under all the circumstances is intensely factual. The majority acknowledges that we must uphold the trial court’s finding on the issue of reasonableness unless the trial court was clearly erroneous in reaching that conclusion. I do not believe Ford has satisfied that standard in this case.
In overturning the trial court’s conclusion that the investigative delay in this case was not unreasonable, the majority focuses on the two lengthy periods of inactivity in the investigation — the eight-month period between March and November 1987, and the 11-month period between November 1987 October 1988. The majority does not accept the trial court’s conclusion that those periods of inactivity were reasonable in light of the competing workload commitments, administrative burdens, and sick leave taken by the agents responsible for the investigation.
That is where I part company with the majority. While long periods of inactivity in an investigation certainly raise questions whether the investigation is being pursued with diligence, the mere fact that there are long periods of inactivity does not render the ensuing delay unreasonable. Presumably, the majority would have been more prepared to find the delays in this case excusable if the agents had taken some investigative steps from time to time rather than doing nothing on the investigation for lengthy periods. The problem is that some work lends itself to being done piecemeal, and some does not. In my view, a delay is not necessarily unreasonable if a busy agent who has many investigations to conduct puts a particular investigation at the end of his queue and does not begin to work on it for an extended period of time.
While it is surely not ideal to have lengthy delays built into an administrative system because of workload levels, it is not unusual. Competing demands are a fact of life, particularly in an investigative bureaucracy in which each agent has multiple investigative responsibilities. In such a setting, investigators often find that it is more efficient to postpone working on one matter until another is completed, rather than attempting to work on multiple matters simultaneously. Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to investigative agents. Others with heavy workloads, such as busy lawyers (and, indeed, even busy judges), often postpone beginning work on particular matters until other matters with more pressing deadlines or earlier spots in the work queue have been completed. For that reason, the fact that no work is done on a particular matter for an extended period of time, or that there are long workload-related periods of delay during which no progress is made on a particular project, does not mean that the delay is unreasonable.
Of course, if Ford had persuaded the trial court that the lack of progress on the investigation was the result of indolence or inattention on the part of the agents or the Customs Service generally, that would be a different matter. But the trial court concluded after hearing three days of evidence in this case that the agents’ competing obligations and other factors provided an adequate explanation for the lengthy periods of delay. Because I do not think the trial court committed clear error in that regard, I would affirm.