Earlier this month, a 72-year-old Virginia man pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate Iranian sanctions. Behrouz Mokhtari of McLean, VA, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and a native of Tehran, Iran. According to the Justice Department, from March 2018 until approximately September 2020, Mokhtari conspired to evade Iranian sanctions administered by the Treasury Department’s Office…
When it comes to bringing product into the United States (importing) from a foreign country, there are a lot of customs brokers and courier services that will get this done for you. But beware, they don’t always do it the correctly and you, as the importer, are responsible regardless of who you have hired to…
Remember the postcard tax return? It’s been touted by various government officials since 1950. The idea is simple (and beautiful): What if you could file your taxes on a simple, easy-to-use postcard? Just imagine all the hours you could save! Or how about Form 1040EZ? The name itself underscores the simplicity. That is, until you…
On December 23, 2021, President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) into law. This establishes a new rebuttable presumption that any goods, wares, articles, or merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China is produced by forced labor. This presumption prohibits the…
Rest assured that the U.S. government and our allies and partners are focused on enforcing the sanctions and restrictions on Russia as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, in recent remarks to the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Matthew Axelrod, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement, described the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and…
“Unprecedented.” “Significant.” “Profound.” “Powerful.” “The mother of all sanctions.” Those are just some of the words being used to describe the comprehensive and sweeping sanctions imposed against Russia by the United States and other allied nations around the world. February 2022 saw the U.S. and our allies make approximately 1,000 additions and changes to its…
The European Union (EU) has been busy at the end of 2021 and into early 2022 in the area of export controls. New laws, interpretations, etc. have occurred. Here are some highlights: EU Updates List of Dual Use Items Controlled On January 6, 2022, the EU published the changes approved last year to the dual-use…
On December 9th, the US government added Cambodia to the naughty list by implementing stricter controls amid the country’s continued human rights abuses, growing corruption, and the deepening of Chinese military influence there. Both the Department of State and the Department of Commerce published new rules which place significantly stricter restrictions on Cambodia. State Department…
If you made a list of corporations that you’d never want to battle in court, which one would be at the top of that list? Perhaps one with $200 billion in cash? Maybe one with a market cap of $2.8 trillion and the second-most valuable brand in the world? Last month, a small Israeli company…
Eighteen years before he wrote Jurassic Park, the novelist Michael Crichton penned a different story titled The Terminal Man. It’s about a computer scientist who undergoes surgery to cure his seizures – having 40 different electrodes embedded in the amygdala part of his brain and connected to a small computer in his shoulder. Spoiler alert! …