On September 7, 2016, the WTO Appellate Body issued its report in United States — Anti-Dumping and Countervailing Measures on Large Residential Washers from Korea, reversing parts of the panel report handed down in March, which had found that the American method of calculating anti-subsidy duties was correct. According to a news report, the dispute arose after the U.S. Department of Commerce had imposed up to 82 percent of anti-subsidy duties on Korean-made washers after a complaint from U.S. manufacturer Whirlpool, who had argued that the Korean machines were sold below their fair value price, a practice referred to as dumping, which was possible because the Korean manufactures received unfair state aid. Addressing Article 2.4.2 of the Anti-Dumping Agreement, the Appellate Body ruled that “the requirement to identify prices which differ significantly means that the investigating authority is required to assess quantitatively and qualitatively the price differences at issue. This assessment may require the investigating authority to consider certain objective market factors, such as circumstances regarding the nature of the product under consideration, the industry at issue, the market structure, or the intensity of competition in the markets at issue, depending on the case at hand,” and reversed the panel’s finding that an evaluation of purely quantitative criteria is sufficient. The Appellate Body further rejected the comparison methodologies used by the U.S. Department of Commerce, stressing that it had failed to explain why it could not take into account the relevant price differences with the standard comparison methodologies, instead taking recourse to an exceptional methodology or an improper combination of methodologies. The Appellate Body also found that the Panel had “improperly endorsed a flawed tying test applied by the [U.S. Department of Commerce] in the Washers countervailing duty investigation, whereby a subsidy is tied to a specific product only when the intended use of the subsidy is known to the granting authority and so acknowledged prior to or concurrent with the bestowal of the subsidy,” and thus found the U.S. had violated its obligations under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) and Article VI:3 of the GATT 1994.