The Department of Commerce publishes an Export Fact Sheet on a regular basis. If you go to the one linked above (for September 2008), you will learn that U.S. exports of goods and services for the first nine months of 2008 grew 16.9% over the first nine months of 2007, to $1,415.2 billion. (The CC is no math whiz, but thinks that comes to $1.4 trillion). Exports comprised over 13% of U.S. GDP in Q3 2008, and the largest consumers of U.S. goods and services are Canada, Mexico, China and Japan in that order. Together these four nations accounted for approximately $424.1 billion of export consumption through September. That's just food for thought before the CC waxes on the imperative of implementing an effective U.S. foreign trade controls compliance program, if, as is increasingly likely, your clients and companies are sending goods abroad.

Even if your clients are just sending baseball cards abroad, you want to have something in place to make sure you're not facilitating funny business or sending them somewhere you're not allowed to. The U.S. export control regime, as the CC has documented previously, is labyrinthine, and includes such daunting-sounding names as OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control of the Department of Treasury), BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security of the Commerce Department), DDTC (Directorate of Defense Trade Controls of the State Department) and the SEC's Office of Global Security Risk, not to mention the host of additional agencies that don't necessarily give scary names to their export control regulators. When a company is basking in the glow of being able to sell to more and more people around the Globe, it can get easy to miss the trees for the forest of export control if you don't have a sufficient internal system designed to ensure that you're not running afoul of these separate but often overlapping regimes. So how can you communicate to your clients the import of controlling exports?

Key Elements of an Effective U.S. Foreign Trade Controls Compliance Program, by Peter L. Flanagan and Les P. Carnegie (Covington & Burling LLP) is a great guide on how to approach implementing a "robust" export compliance program. The authors' acknowledgement that there is no one-size fits all solution in this area (as is true of compliance programs across the board) makes their work one that does fit all sizes. They urge that rather than have a U.S. foreign trade controls program that is separate from an entity's broader compliance program, companies should "build on and integrate with existing functional organizations and staff." While they offer a summary of the key components you'll need to have to call your program effective in addressing compliance with U.S. foreign trade controls, the authors also review that labyrinth alluded to above. So don't worry if you don't know what OFAC does. Still, before you can implement a plan, you have to know how your client's products relate to the regulatory scheme, and to that end, the authors suggest (and explain)

• an analysis of product and technology lines
• specific company-risk assessments
• understanding prohibited or restricted destination, parties and activities and
• knowing the procedural requirements that relate to foreign trade activity.

After all that, you can start molding your compliance plan. That's in part 3 of this great piece, which you can import to your hard drive by clicking the CC's little export link below.