The Commerce Department has less than 60 days to better explain how it applied an antidumping duty of 4.78% on Vietnamese shrimp in 2014, but it’s received a thumbs up to keep using its current approach for setting such duties.

In a 40-page ruling delivered Thursday, US Court of International Trade (CIT) judge Claire Kelly upheld Commerce’s methodology for calculating its dumping margins and rejected demands by the Chicago, Illinois-based Mazzetta Company to place documents regarding a settlement between the governments of the United States and Vietnam of a dispute before the World Trade Organization in the public domain.

The case, as explained by trade attorney Nathan Rickard, with the Washington, D.C.-based firm of Picard Kentz & Rowe, relates to the way the Commerce Department sets rates for companies in communist nations, or nonmarket economies, that are deemed to be operating independently from their government.

Companies deemed to be operating as part of such a nation’s government may get hit with incredible tariffs, such as the 25.76% fee charged Vietnamese companies in such circumstances, said Rickard, who recently analyzed the decision on behalf of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a group of US domestic shrimpers typically opposed to imports. However, if an investigation determines a company is operating independent of its nation, that company and “all others” like it may be charged a lower fee, a practice that Kelly said was okay for Commerce to continue.

Mazzetta, representatives of which were not immediately available to comment for this story, had argued unsuccessfully that other companies deemed to be operating outside of their nation’s control should have their own fees set separately.

“Nothing in the statutory framework requires Commerce to calculate the all-others rate using multiple rates nor precludes Commerce from relying on just one rate,” the judge said.

Also, Commerce may choose to ignore instances where a greater than fair value price has been paid for a product, something importers have suggested should result in reduced dumping duties, Kelly determined.

In a small victory for the Vietnamese exporters, however, the CIT judge sent Commerce back to re-consider its use of import data from Bangladesh as a surrogate market value for the cost of Vietnamese frozen shrimp purchases. The exporters had argued that it made more sense to use India shrimp prices for comparison purposes.

The court has also asked Commerce to provide an explanation for the agency’s policy of excluding revenue from the sale of packaging scrap as an offset to exporters’ costs of production.

The ruling seems to put Mazzetta and other Vietnamese shrimp importers back on the hook for the 4.78% fee charged back in 2014.