BIS recently announced a settlement with Mohawk Global Logistics Corporation for $155,000 ($20,000 of which was suspended if Mohawk behaved itself during a probationary period).   The penalty arose out of Mohawk’s export of items to institutions on the Entity List without the required license.  In both instances, Mohawk screened against the list, but things went wrong.

One of the exports went to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (“UESTC”).  Rather than screen against the full name of the university, Mohawk just screened the university’s commonly-used acronym — UESTC.   As a result, it failed to flag the transaction.  BIS, in the charging documents, noted that the address it had for UESTC was a “near-match” (whatever that means) to the address shown for UESTC on the Entity List.  The take-away here, of course, is that exporters should screen entire names and addresses.

One of the other exports was to the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics otherwise known as VNIIEF (because the name in Russian – Всероссийский Научно-Исследовательский Институт Експериментальной Физики [Vserossiyskiy Nauchno-Issledovatelckiy Eksperimentalnoy Fiziki] — is abbreviated as ВНИИЕФ or VNIIEF when transliterated to the Roman alphabet — got that?).  Now for this export the transliterated Roman abbreviation resulted in a hit, which, for some unexplained reason, the Mohawk export supervisor simply ignored.

A footnote dropped by BIS on VNIIEF reveals the perils of foreign language names and the Entity List.   The initial listing was for the “All-Union” Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.  When this was updated to the correct “All-Russian” Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in 2011, the common acronym VNIIEF (but not ARSIEP, which is, clearly, a better acronym) was added.  But searches of VNIIEF, the common name of that entity, prior to 2011 would not have turned up anything.   The moral of this story:  don’t search abbreviations or acronyms.

The fine here seems high.   The goods involved were EAR99 items and worth, in total, about $200,000.  A license probably would have been granted if requested so there’s no palpable harm to national security here.  And Mohawk tried to screen but just did not do a very good job of it.  However, it’s not like they, like many exporters, did not even try to screen the recipients.   Granted the inexplicable activity of the Mohawk supervisor in overriding the hit for VNIIEF would permit some aggravation of the penalty.  And perhaps the failure to screen addresses when they had a “near match” of the correct address further annoyed BIS.  But it seems to me here that BIS is fining incompetence rather than malice.

https://efoia.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/export-violations/export-violations-2018/1193-e2561/file