PwC, SLEA facilitate discussion on ‘First Sale for Exporters’ Forum
Monday, 9 September 2013 00:01
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PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Sri Lanka in collaboration with Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Association (SLAEA) will be facilitating a forum on ‘First Sale for Exporters’ on 13 September at the Winchester Hall at The Kingsbury Hotel. The forum is targeted at CEOs and CFOs of Apparel industry in Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan manufacturing and export trade has faced a severe competition due to the emergence of other markets and due to increase in cost of production. Taxes and tariffs are an important element of costs for the buyers and any advantage would be a significant benefit to the buyers.
First Sale For Export (FSFE) is a US statutorily provided and judicially upheld valuation concept wherein merchandise imported into the US pursuant to a multi-tiered structure involving at least a manufacturing entity (factory), a middleman and a purchaser/US importer may be valued for customs duty purposes based on the arm’s length price of the sale from the manufacturer to the middleman, rather than on the ultimate (higher) sales price to the purchaser/US importer. Within the European Union, FSFE is also an accepted basis of customs valuation with virtually identical criteria as the US criteria.
Hence the scope of the forum on ‘First Sale for Exporters’ is to provide the regulatory and transactional knowledge on the FSFE scheme including the valuations, enable exporters to relate the applicability of it to the Sri Lankan context while instructing and guiding the participants on who benefits and how they could be benefited through the FSFE scheme while shedding light on its applicability in our market trade.
The forum will be facilitated by two leading experts from PwC USA, Maytee Pereira and Tracey Stefanitsis, who have significant experience with assisting multinational clients with developing, execute and maintaining successful First Sale for Export valuation programs. Both are licensed attorneys who have assisted judges sitting on the US Court of International Trade, which is the federal court with judicial competency over matters arising under the US customs and trade laws. They have worked with Fortune 500 companies involved in a wide range of industries ranging from apparel to electronics to biopharmaceuticals to realise efficiencies in their global trade movements as well as their regulatory compliance.
In particular, they have worked with several Sri Lankan apparel manufacturers and their US importing customers to implement successful First Sale for Export valuation programs, which have been acknowledged by US Customs & Border Protection.
