Planet Money - The trade fraud detective

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

When David Rashid took over US autoparts maker Plews and Edelmann, the company was losing business to its Chinese rival, Qingdao Sunsong. Both companies make power steering hoses, but Sunsong was offering its hoses to retailers at a much lower price.Then, in 2018, the Trump administration threw companies like Rashid's a lifeline, by announcing tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, including some autoparts. Rashid thought the tariffs would finally force Sunsong to raise its prices, but, somehow, the company never did.It was a mystery. And it led Rashid to take on a new role – amateur trade fraud investigator. How could his competitor, Sunsong, absorb that 25% tax without changing its prices? And why had all of Sunsong's steering hoses stopped coming from China and started coming from Thailand?On today's episode, the wide gulf between how tariffs work in theory... and how they actually work in practice. And David Rashid's quest to figure out what, if anything, he could do about it. It's a quest that will involve international detectives, forensic chemists, and a friendship founded on a shared love for hummus.This episode was hosted by Keith Romer and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Ko Takasugi-Czernowin. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Okay, so tell me if this sounds like you. You love NPR's podcasts, you wish they weren't interrupted by sponsor breaks like this one, and you want to support NPR's mission of creating a more informed public. If this does sound like you, then it's time to sign up for perks across more than 20 podcasts with the NPR Plus bundle. Learn more at plus.npr.org. This is Planet Money from NPR. David Rashid had worked setting up and running auto parts factories for the better part of two decades when he got this job offer that would launch him on a very strange journey. Some friends of mine called me up and asked me if I could help them out with a business that they had invested in

That made power steering hoses these hoses. They're skinny They're made of rubber and steel and they're vital to the power steering system in your car And that is about as technical as we're gonna get for now. That's about as technical as I think I can Anyway David's friends who offered him this new job They worked for a private equity fund that had just made this big investment in a company called Plues and Edelman. It plants in both the US and Mexico.

So when you were brought on, what was the mission that they gave you? What were you asked to do? Fix it. Fix what? Fix the trend. The downward trend. The downward trend. Pluse and Edelman was struggling.

A Chinese company called Qingdao Sunsong had started selling their own power steering hoses. And their prices were so low that they were taking away customers. David takes the job and he gets to work. He figures out how to make the company more efficient in all these different ways. You know, we worked on bringing the inventories down. We worked on consolidating two manufacturing facilities into one. This sounds like a lot of Excel spreadsheets

were created during this process. Oh Lord, absolutely. David says they did eventually get to a point where they could produce their hoses for a lot less, but they were still losing business to that Chinese competitor, Sunsong. David was checking in with buyers from the big auto parts stores, and they told him Sunsong's hoses were still cheaper. And then David's company gets thrown a lifeline.

The Trump administration fires one of the first shots in this ongoing trade war with China. A new 10% tariff on, among other things, auto parts made in China. In 2019, that 10% tariff is increased to 25%. David knows that Qingdao Sunsong has these two North American subsidiaries in Ohio. And now, when those subsidiaries import steering hoses from China, they will have to pay a 25% tax on the value of those hoses, which should drive up how much Sunsong charges its customers.

I thought, okay, now we're gonna see a change and now we're going to have an opportunity to potentially take some business back, but that's not what happened. David says somehow, despite these new tariffs, Sunsong's prices stayed low. And so we were scratching our head. We're saying, hold on, tariffs came in and yet we're still not competitive. How does that work? How does pricing not change if tariffs just kicked in? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Guo.

And I'm Keith Romer. The thing that had David Rashid scratching his head, it goes right to the heart of one of the big reasons for the tariffs on Chinese imports for both the Trump and Biden administrations. Yeah, among other things, these tariffs are intended to help American manufacturers to keep companies like David's from being wiped out by their Chinese competitors, by helping them compete on price. But for David's company, the tariffs were, for some reason, not doing that. Today on the show, the wide gulf between how tariffs work in theory and how they actually work in practice, and David's quest to figure out what, if anything, he could do about it. A quest that will involve international detectives,

forensic chemists, and good old-fashioned American bureaucracy. If you're hearing this, that means you haven't gone sponsor-free with NPR+. If you're hearing this, that means you haven't gone sponsor free with NPR Plus. Join us on the plus side for awesome podcast perks across more than 20 NPR podcasts, including bonus episodes, behind the scenes content, sponsor free listening, and more. Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org and never hear this promo again. The candidates for November are set. I know Donald Trump's tight. Between now and election day.

We are not going back. A campaign season unfolding faster. Kamala Harris is not getting a promotion. Than any in recent history. Make America great again. Follow it all with new episodes every weekday on the NPR Politics Podcast. David Rashid thought that the new tariffs on Chinese imports would force his Chinese competitor Sunsong to significantly raise its prices, which would help his company win

back customers. But two years after the tariffs went into effect, neither of those things had happened. And David's company, Plues and Edelman, was having real problems. They had to sell off a division and lay off about 50 workers. You know, these are good people, but as the size of your business shrinks, it's impossible to continue to keep them on. And so, there are absolute consequences to us if we can't successfully compete with Sunsong. David knew he had to get to the bottom of this mystery of how his competitor Sunsong

had managed to keep its prices low despite the tariffs. He brought together all of his company's brightest minds. So we put together like a, you know, it's like an A team of different skills. And we started asking the question, how are they doing this? And what are we going to do to investigate? Because we felt like something was going on, but we didn't know. We didn't even know where to look. One member of that A team was Pluse's head of IT. He was like, you know, we can actually go online and look up all of Sunsong shipments

coming into their US subsidiaries. We can see what's in them and where they're coming from. And what we were able to see was before, let's say mid 2018, they were importing all of their product from Qingdao Sunsong, which was their parent in China. Then just before the tariffs hit, there's this void where we don't see any importations. Then in 2020, it appears again. But now they're pulling from someplace in Thailand,

a company we had never heard of called Imperial Cable. And there's a logic to Sunsong changing things up and getting some of its product from a Thai supplier. The tariffs that the Trump administration put in place, they were not on Chinese companies. They were on goods made in China. So any Thai made hoses would be able to come into the US tariff free. But after looking over all the import data for Sunsong, David was like,

I'm not sure that is what's going on here. So he had some folks from his team go down to their local auto parts store to buy a few of those Sunsong hoses. Some of them said country of origin China, some of them said country of origin Thailand, and that made sense because as you go through a transition, right, the inventory on the shelf, some of it's going to be a little older, and so it came from China, and some of it's going to be newer, and it came from Thailand. They took the hoses out of the bags, the Chinese-made hoses and the ones from Thailand, and they compared them, these two skinny black rubber hoses with metal fittings and tubes on the end.

They looked at the design of the hoses, the look and the feel of the rubber, the way the little metal joints at the end were shaped. And we could not see any difference. And, you know, because I spent 15 years manufacturing this stuff, I'm used to having two plants that are supposed to be making the same product, but you know, in spite of our best efforts, it's hard to get it exactly the same.

A suspicion starts to crystallize in David's mind. Is Sunsong really making hoses in Thailand, or is it just shipping Chinese-made hoses via Thailand to get out of paying the tariff? Because that would be fraud. At this point, David wasn't thinking about what he was doing as collecting evidence for some future government investigation. He was just trying to figure out for sure what Sun Song was up to. He sends samples of Sun Song's hoses to a couple of labs that specialize in what's basically forensic analysis, one in Canada and one in Ohio.

I'm Eric Sharp. I'm the CEO and founder of ACE Laboratories. Eric runs the lab in Ohio and he says this is not the first time a company has come to his team asking the kinds of questions David was asking. What's happening a lot is these producers in China, which are subject to these tariffs, are setting up a factory in Southeast Asia. But the thing is, is it's normally just a foothold.

So they'll produce maybe 10% of what they're doing. The rest of it, they'll actually ship product into and just use it as a hub for moving product through, not actually manufacturing. This is called transshipment, which isn't illegal, but it is illegal if you're using it to get out of paying tariffs. A few years ago, Eric was in Vietnam and Thailand

as part of a trade mission trying to make connections between US and Southeast Asian companies. And while he was there, he thinks he saw signs of this kind of illegal transshipment firsthand. He visited some new factories, to be clear, not Sunsong factories, but just plants that had started shipping a lot of goods to the US. And the factories, they just seemed too small to produce everything they were exporting. Also, when he asked for a tour, they were like, no, no, uh-uh, not a chance.

Those two things together makes you question the legitimacy of if it's actually being manufactured there. There is not any reliable data about just how much illegal trend shipping is going on. It's illegal, so companies are trying to hide it. But when you look at how much countries are importing and exporting in total, there have been some interesting patterns since the tariffs went into effect. China is now exporting less to the US, but at the same time it's exporting more to intermediate countries like Thailand and Vietnam and Mexico.

And those intermediate countries, they are now sending more goods into the United States. A lot of that shift in trade flows is legit, whether it's American companies buying more from those intermediate countries or Chinese companies setting up factories there. But at least some of that shift in trade flows is cheating. Anyway, to see whether the Sunsong steering hoses that David had sent, the ones from China and the ones from Thailand, are in fact the same hoses. Eric's lab runs them through this whole battery of tests. Yeah, this is the Rubber Nerds version of CSI.

First, they look at the material that's used in the hoses. One test is called TGA, which is Thermogravimetric Analysis. Thermogravimetric Analysis is this really neat process where you cut off a chunk of the rubber so that you can burn it and see what happens. So everything that's inside of a rubber component has a point to where it burns and volatilizes. So what this test does is it slowly ramps up temperature and it weighs how much is burning off at each temperature point. So we can say, oh, it's got X amount of polymer,

X amount of filler, X amount of plasticizer in it, and break it down quantitatively in that way. They run all these other tests, and when they compare the results for the two hoses, everything looks really similar. So there was no deviation. So that you lit the two pieces of rubber on fire in a variety of ways and they seemed to be basically made of the same stuff?

Is that the takeaway? Yeah, yeah. And that's always the first screening check. The next check involved cutting open the tube and comparing the thread and the metal inside used to reinforce the tube. And again, exact match. Also the metal fitting on the end of the hose, it was clearly crimped by the exact same crimping tool. Eric says the chances that the steering hose labeled Made in China and the steering hose labeled Made in Thailand

were actually made in different factories is basically zero. If they're able to match in two different locations like that, they have a pretty good engineering team because I've never seen a company do that before. Eric sends David this whole forensic report and David's like, I knew it. It told us that the Thai parts and the Chinese parts, we believed in our opinion, were coming from the same location and therefore it suggested that they weren't being manufactured in Thailand. And if they're not being manufactured in Thailand but in China, then it sure looked like trade

fraud. And David thinks proving that Sunsong is committing trade fraud could help his company get some of its business back. Now, David wasn't only gathering forensic evidence, he had also been pursuing a separate, more direct mode of investigation to figure out what was going on at Imperial Cable. You know, that tie company that, at least according to the import records, was manufacturing hoses for a sunsong. For this part of the story, bear with me, we actually have to go back in time a little

bit. To this one night when David met an Israeli guy named Gilad at a CrossFit class. One day after a hard workout, we're all lying down, just exhausted, and we just start chatting. And we start talking about hummus of all things because, I mean, my background, my father's a Palestinian. And so we start chatting about hummus and I love to cook and I make hummus and he loves to cook and he makes hummus. I mean just try to find me a more stable foundation for a friendship. You cannot. Anyway, over time David and Galad become good enough friends for David to learn that when Galad did his

military service in Israel, he made some connections in military intelligence. And that now he runs a cybersecurity company that knows its way around some of the darker corners of the Internet. Okay. And so this is where it gets back to the story about the power steering hoses. Because when David is looking around for ways to investigate Imperial cable, he's eventually like, maybe I should ask Gilad if he's got some connections that could help me here.

At first, I was really nervous because I thought, I don't want him to think that. I just felt awkward asking. I felt like somehow it was not appropriate. Why did you feel that way? I don't know. Like, hey, can you put me in touch with your secret agent buddies? Like, you know, that's not You know, that's not something I felt necessarily comfortable with but

Effectively, that's what I asked and he said, you know, it is such an entrepreneur. He's like David. No problem I got you covered walk me through your situation and then all all I got you covered. Walk me through your situation and then I'll see what I can do. Galad ends up connecting David with a private investigation firm that has assets on the ground in Southeast Asia. We were having weekly calls. I was talking to someone in Cape Town, someone in Tel Aviv, and someone in Thailand. David needs them to dig up some concrete proof that the Thai company, Imperial Cable, is not manufacturing these hoses, that the hoses are still all coming from China.

So the investigators head to the ports. So we can see very clearly all of the product coming from Thailand to the United States. All that information is available. It's public. What you can't see is the product from China into Thailand, but this is information that our investigators were able to obtain from a confidential informant. So they had a guy on the inside who could show them the paperwork? Is that what I'm to understand?

That's how I understood it. This new port data from Thailand put a whole new company on their radar, a company called Viriant. They could see Sun Song was shipping hoses from China to Viriant. And then somehow those same hoses were showing up as imports to one of Sunsong's subsidiaries in Ohio coming from the other Thai company, Imperial Cable. So to try and figure out how these two Thai companies are connected, the investigators do some more digging.

And then they were able to get the financial information for these two companies out of Thailand. The investigators send all these documents to David and he starts poking around. You get into it, right? Like you burrow into this data and it just it's infinite. David, he has been looking at financial reports for decades. He lives and breathes this stuff.

And the more he looks at the numbers, the more suspect it all seems. He's like, this is not what your records look like if your primary business is manufacturing things. These records, they're more like what you'd see from companies that make their money warehousing things for some third party. Eventually, David would learn that Variat and Imperial Cable were in fact deeply intertwined. They were run and owned by the same people. They were even located in the same building. Viriant and Imperial Cable did not respond to our request for comment.

But what seemed to be happening was that Viriant was bringing Sun Song cables in one side of the plant, and then Imperial Cable was sending them out the other side. And somewhere in that process, Sunsong was able to magically transform their Chinese hoses into Thai hoses. Voila, no more 25% tariff. David was like, this is it. We have got them.

Now what? After the break, what happens when David takes all that evidence he's gathered and gives it to the U.S. government? The Democratic National Convention is underway in Chicago. After a whirlwind start to their campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are celebrating their newly minted ticket, and Democrats are pitching their platform to the nation.

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From CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. And you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Okay, so David had managed to gather all of this evidence. Physical evidence that showed that the Chinese-made steering hoses were the same as the ones that were labeled as being made in Thailand, and trade and financial evidence from confidential informants in Thailand that corroborated that physical evidence. But it was not totally clear what he should do with all of that evidence.

And look, in an ideal world, if some company was violating U.S. trade laws, the U.S. government would have already found them out and stopped them. Kind of the first line of defense here is customs and border protection. This is the federal agency that has the authority to take a look at every plane load, every shipping container and package that comes into the country. But there's a reason customs might not catch something like steering hose fraud. The sheer volume of stuff that comes into the U.S. is mind-boggling. More than $3 trillion worth of imports every year. And customs has to police things like illegal shipments of fentanyl and guns.

It's a lot. So in 2021, David embarked on the next phase of his journey, trying to get the government to act. First, he reached out to some trade lawyers. They told him that what you want to do is file something called a false claims act lawsuit. Basically, it's a way of saying to the Department of Justice, I know this other company has been lying to the government and I can prove it. So we put it all together, the financial data, the trade data, the lab data, and we gave

it to the Department of Justice and asked them to intervene. And six months later, five months later, they came back and told us that they declined to intervene. All that work and then nothing. You spent years gathering all of this evidence and they say, yeah, sorry, we can't help you. Like how, how did that make you feel? Deflated. I mean, my, my partner and I, I never forget, we're sitting at the same table, we had the call set up, we were expecting success. And when we got the news, we just looked at each other. And we put our heads into our arms. We're like, what are we going to do? No, oh my God.

Because remember, they are sure Sunsong is doing something illegal. They think Sunsong is keeping their prices low, in part, by committing trade fraud. And for years now, David's own company, Ploos & Edelman, it has been losing business to Sunsong. And losing money. David thinks there has to be some way we can do something with all this evidence we have. So he fills out what's called an e-allegation on the Customs and Border Protection website, but that doesn't seem to go anywhere either. And around this time, his lawyers tell him, you know, there is one more thing we can try. We did just hire this new guy.

My name is Jason Kenner and I'm the litigation lead at Sandler, Travis and Rosenberg. Before joining Sandler, Travis and Rosenberg, Jason had worked for a different part of the Department of Justice than the one David had been talking to before, for a team called the Trade Fraud Task Force. He says, look, the way the government is set up to deal with trade fraud cases, it's kind of a mess. Which you have as a very fragmented approach. And you know, everyone has their own little fiefdoms and their own little tools and you

don't want to get in each other's ways. But Jason thought that the little fiefdom where he used to work, the Trade Fraud Task Force, they might actually be able to help David. I mean, it's right there in the name. They fight trade fraud. Or at least they try to. How many attorneys work there? If there's two or three on there right now, I think we're lucky.

So David and Jason have all these calls over the course of months with the Trade Fraud Task Force. But then at some point, the calls stop. They've given the task force all the evidence they have. And once again, all David can do is wait. Jason says he now understands how hard this opaque slow moving process is for companies in a way that he never did when he worked for the government. I never truly grasped the gravity of the situation until I got into private practice and you start talking to companies about

you know what is this really doing to me and you know what you're wait a minute you're telling me if case can take five six seven eight nine ten years I can tell you I'm not going to be here in five six seven eight nine ten years. ten years, I can tell you I'm not going to be here in five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years. So I've always understood the importance of trade enforcement. I have a new appreciation of not only you need robust enforcement, but you need quick. And presumably enforcement may be even harder to come by now that the US has slapped tariffs on what was its largest trading partner, China. I mean, think about it. There are so many companies in China that export to the US has slapped tariffs on what was its largest trading partner, China. I mean, think about it.

There are so many companies in China that export to the US. And now a lot of them have at least an incentive to try and skirt the rules. There's just a much bigger pool of potential scoff laws. Okay, so once David had taken things as far as he could with the Department of Justice, he reached out to the congressman for the district where Plews and Edelman is located.

And the congressman took a big interest in this case. A committee he was on wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security accusing Sunsong of trade fraud. Which is why it's hard to say what ultimately led to the government taking action in Plues and Edelman's case. But earlier this year, things started to happen. So in January, I think it was the 18th of January, Department of Homeland Security raided Sunsong North America's facilities in Moraine, Ohio.

Federal search warrant, investigators crawling all over the place for hours. Um, and Department of Homeland Security just indicated that it's part of an ongoing investigation. Now, we reached out to Ching Dao Sun Song and its subsidiaries in the U.S., but they did not respond. And no one from Homeland Security or Customs or the Department of Justice was willing to comment on the case. But the way this usually goes is that prosecutors will review the evidence they've seized, and if they think they've got enough, they will put the case in front of a grand jury

and try to get an indictment. If that happens, Sunsong could face millions of dollars in penalties, and some of its employees could even face prison time. You know, when we got into this, I didn't anticipate this taking this long, but I can't give up. David has spent five years, and he says north of a million dollars, gathering evidence and trying to get the government to take action against Sunsong.

It's been a hard road for him and his company. I mean, you know, we have, yes, we've made, you know, we've had layoffs and yes, we've lost business, but we can rehire and we can build back our business. And so I'm optimistic. I have to be. So on the one hand, this is a story about how the United States enforces its trade laws and how hard that can be. But there is this other story, kind of hidden behind that first one.

That story is about how tariffs actually work in a globalized world. Yeah, these tariffs are designed in part to be a kind of wall protecting American companies from their Chinese competitors. But tariffs don't necessarily work as well as they once did. There are so many ways around that wall now. Some of them are illegal, like what Sunsong seems to have been doing by just shipping

things through Thailand. But there are also perfectly legal ways around that wall. For one, Chinese companies can simply assemble or manufacture their goods in other countries. And this has been happening a lot. Since the tariffs went into effect, there are all these new Chinese-owned factories going up in Vietnam and Mexico and Thailand. Even Sunsong seems to be taking this more legitimate route. Financial records suggest that in the last few years, they have invested millions of dollars

setting up an assembly plant in Thailand. It won't get them out of legal consequences that might come from that raid on their US subsidiary, but it might let them shift enough production work to Thailand that they will legally be able to export power steering hoses to the US, tariff free. A quick note, in this episode, we mentioned the Department of Homeland Security, which is a sponsor of NPR. Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by co-takers Suji Chernevin. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Special thanks today to David Applegate and Emily Blanchard. I'm Keith Romer. I'm Jeff Guo. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR.