The Bureau of Industry and Security added eight entities to the Entity List for their involvement in nuclear proliferation activities and issued several other revisions, one correction and one removal from the Entity List and Military End User List. The eight entities, located in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, include laboratory equipment providers, engineering companies and electronics makers. They will face a license requirement for all items subject to the Export Administration Regulations, and BIS will impose a license review policy of presumption of denial. No license exceptions will be available. The changes take effect June 1.

Export controls over 3D-printed guns were moved from the Commerce Department to the State Department following a court’s decision this week to officially waive a preliminary injunction that had blocked the transfer (see 2105030021).

The Treasury Department’s upcoming budget proposal will ask for more money to address sanctions evasion practices, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a House Appropriations subcommittee May 27. Yellen said the agency is focused on limiting evasion tactics and is hoping to collaborate more with allies to address those issues and increase the overall effectiveness of economic sanctions.

Congress and the administration can take a more active role to allow humanitarian aid to better flow to sanctioned regions in Africa, which is often hindered from receiving that aid, charitable groups and sanctions experts told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa May 25. Some of the issues lie with licenses issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and a slow bureaucratic process that unintentionally slows aid shipments, they said.

The U.S. National Security Council is hoping to better harmonize export controls and foreign investment restrictions across the Five Eyes alliance, an effort that will be a key aspect of President Joe Biden’s future talks with European and other allies, a senior NSC official said. The U.S. is also reviewing how government agencies use those tools to better address a rise in export control evasion tactics, the official said.

The State Department released a proposal May 26 to permanently allow employees involved in International Traffic in Arms Regulations-related activity to work remotely, a long-awaited measure that industry is expected to welcome. The rule proposes to permanently update the ITAR’s definition of a “regular employee,” which will also now include certain “contractual staff.”

Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories for May 17-21 in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching on the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the U.S. and Canada could not reach an agreement on the administration of Canada's dairy tariff rate quotas, so the dispute will be decided by a panel. At issue is the fact that Canada has reserved the large majority of TRQs for Canadian processors, which means that consumer goods produced in the U.S. like ice cream, cheese or yogurt face higher tariffs in Canada because very little of the TRQ is available to Canadian retailers. Even when it's not restricted to processors, the TRQs are reserved for distributors, which means American producers cannot pitch their goods at lower prices directly to retail chains.

Sanctions compliance is increasingly presenting challenges to companies around the world as more countries turn to sanctions as a foreign policy tool, Baker McKenzie lawyers said. Some recent challenges include the growing emphasis on sanctions enforcement and the due diligence issues presented by countries with little publicly available information on ownership chains, the lawyers said.

A “groundbreaking” settlement agreement between a German software company and three U.S. agencies (see 2104290069 and 2105070042) may signal greater enforcement of sanctions and export violations and present more compliance challenges for industry, law firms said. The more than $8 million settlement between SAP SE and the Justice, Treasury and Commerce departments -- the first non-prosecution agreement under the Justice Department's revised voluntary disclosure policies (see 2008180043) -- also includes several important lessons for businesses and may lay out how monitorships can be avoided, the firms said.