A senior official from the biggest U.S. business lobby called on Washington to provide tax credits stipulated under the Inflation Reduction Act(IRA) to South Korean electric vehicle(EV) makers.

Meeting with South Korean media outlets in Washington last Thursday, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President for Asia, Charles Freeman, said he was very concerned over the attempt to use the supply chain crisis to effectively reinforce protectionism.

Freeman said he conveyed his concerns to the U.S. government, saying that the IRA amounts to a collision between its two goals of bolstering economic integration with South Korea and strengthening the U.S. manufacturing sector and supply chains.

As the U.S. Treasury Department prepares detailed regulations of the Act, the official cited experts who have said that excluding foreign-made EVs would go against the South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement(FTA) and World Trade Organization(WTO) rules.

According to the IRA, EVs must be assembled in North America or meet a percentage requirement for battery component sourcing in order to qualify for a tax credit of up to 75-hundred dollars.