Combating Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Office of Exporter Services. In addition to staff at Commerce headquarters, the Office ofExporter Services (OExS) maintains a Western Regional Office in Irvine, CA, and has oneemployee resident in the Silicon Valley. These offices provide advice and consultation tothe exporting community on compliance with the EAR. OExS develops ExportManagement System Guidelines that companies use to ensure compliance with the EARand conducts export licensing workshops in the U.S. and internationally. These seminarsprovide training to U.S. exporters, freight forwarders, foreign distributors and foreign resellersof U.S. origin technology. This office also chairs the Operating Committee Informed,the interagency process by which U.S. exporters are informed of special licensingrequirements for foreign entities of proliferation concern (the Entity List, Supp. 4 to Part744).Office of Strategic Trade and Foreign Policy Controls, Office of Nuclear and MissileTechnology, Office of Chemical and Biological Controls and Treaty Compliance.These offices relate directly to combating proliferation and are organized according to themultilateral proliferation-related regimes. These offices are responsible for thedevelopment, implementation, and modification of proliferation-related export controls, aswell as controls related to sanctions and regional stability. Personnel from these officesrepresent Commerce in interagency export control policy deliberations, internationalmultilateral export control deliberations (Wassenaar, AG, NSG and MTCR), andinternational treaty deliberations (CWC and BWC).The Office of Strategic Trade and Foreign Policy Controls administers national securityexport controls, which include items also controlled proliferation reasons, e.g., highperformance computers. OSTFP also includes the encryption licensing division. Exportcontrols on encryption are not considered to be proliferation-related.The Office of Chemical and Biological Controls and Treaty Compliance will be responsiblefor industry compliance under the CWC, including receiving data declarations from U.S.companies and facilitating domestic visits of international inspection teams. New staff,hardware and software have been acquired to meet these new responsibilities.These three offices are responsible for responding to classification requests from theexporting community and processing applications for export licenses. The licensingofficers (LO’s) include technical personnel and analysts. Many of those with technical skillswere hired during the Cold War era and reflect that era’s focus on strategic technologies.Licensing officers who have special technical expertise or are supervisors are GS-14s andGS-15s, while others are GS-13s. BXA is recruiting personnel with technical expertiserelated to proliferation technologies and some of these positions will be higher grades, butit is still difficult to match salaries such individuals can command in the private sector.These licensing officers are responsible for the processing of export license applicationsfor dual-use commodities and technologies. They do initial review of export licenseapplications, ensuring the proper classification of the items on the application, assessing81