Thank you. And thank you for the question. It is a critical question as we move forward.
Circumvention did not occur against the Maritime Lumber Bureau's certificate of origin program. I would make the assertion, and data would demonstrate, that circumvention occurred against the Canadian government export permit program. In the first four years of the SLA, before it became a required entry document, the data indicating the actual imports into the United States and what shows on the Maritime Lumber Bureau's certificate of origin program showed a 914 million board foot difference between our data and what actually entered the United States. That's about a 15% difference. We fought hard to have the certificate of origin become a required entry document when we were exempted from this case. I'm happy to tell you, from 2001 to 2004, there's not an 11 million variance out of seven billion board feet of shipments, which is less than two-tenths of 1%, demonstrating conclusively that certificate of origin must continue to be a required entry document to prohibit circumvention.
I won't go into it. Essentially, under the export permit program, the enforcement mechanism is through prosecution. We have a number of enforcement mechanisms, which basically means they don't ship if it's misused. And that takes place within 30 days, not 10 or 12 years.
That was the first part of your question. I think the next part, Mr. LeBlanc, was about the duty deposits. I do have a few suggestions, particularly to hurry this up.
We've had the experience with some duty deposits that have been liquidated from the administrative review 1. If you understand, each entry gets a cheque. There are about a million cheques destined for Canada, which is part of the delay. If we could get a statement of what was owed by the U.S. to Canada, and the Canadian government bought the receivable, with that money being fully repaid at whatever percentage it is, or failing that, if the Canadian government would like to advance the billion dollars they've committed to the U.S. industry, allow the cheques to come back and then tax those Canadian importers of record when they receive the money, we could get them more quickly.
Those are not detailed proposals; they're thoughts of what might happen. If we think out of the box, not to exacerbate subsidies, but to think about assisting the industry, there are a number of ways forward.