21.13.    Experience of the United States of America: Definition of “related parties”. Related party, or intra-firm trade, refers to shipments betweenUnited States companies and their foreign subsidiaries as well as trade betweenUnited States subsidiaries of foreign companies and their affiliates abroad. For export transactions, firms are “related” if either party owns, directly or indirectly, 10 per cent or more of the other party (see Section 30.6 (10) of the Foreign Trade Regulations). This definition of related party corresponds exactly to that used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in its annual surveys of multinational activity. For imports, firms are “related” if either owns, controls or holds voting power equivalent to 6 per cent of the outstanding voting stock or shares of the other organization (see Section 402 (e) of the Tariff Act of 1930). 

21.14.    Compilation and publication of data by the United States Census Bureau. Related party data are compiled of administrative records from official United States import and export merchandise trade statistics. Related-party shipments are identified by the indicators “R”, for related, and “N”, for non-related, which are required for all export transactions and most import transactions. Selling prices are used as a basis for determining the value of shipments; but in general, it is required that the goods sold between related parties be valued as if the transactions were carried out between unrelated parties.^[7]

[7] The Foreign Trade Division (FTD) of the United States Census Bureau releases aggregated related party data through an annually published press release, available from http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/related_party/index.html. Additional related party data, which are not published in the annual press release, can be obtained from the FTD Related Party Database (http://sasweb.ssd.census.gov/relatedparty).