Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think that in the question you have more or less gone through the process. It's not in all cases, but in a number of cases the importers have up to four years to change the original classification of the goods.
As you said, that happened 200,000 times during that one year. It resulted in refunds. The difficulty is that when somebody comes along four years later and says, “What I told you I imported in the first place wasn't what I actually imported; I imported something else”, that's four years down the road, and the goods are probably in many cases already in the market, have already been used, and may not even exist anymore. The difficulty is the difficulty of the department's being able to verify that.
We noted in the report that the agency itself indicated that the longer the amount of time that passes before somebody makes the adjustment, the more likely it is that perhaps the adjustment isn't totally the right adjustment.
I also, though, want to point out that yes, it was 136 million dollars' worth of refunds. The importer said, “I didn't import what I told you I imported originally; I imported something else, and that something else has a lower duty on it, so you owe me some money back for what I paid.”
In the other case, there were also instances in which the importer came back later on and said, “I imported something else, and the duty is higher, so I owe the government money on that.” To be totally cynical, which comes along with my job, I suppose, that may be a case of an importer's actually managing their float—