Tariffs Today: CBP Reports Progress on Refund Process
Source
American Shipper
Post Date
03/16/2026
U.S. Customs and Border Protection ?s making satisfactory progress?toward the timely development of a process to refund IEEPA tariffs but will have to provide another by March 19, Judge Rid Eaton of the Court of International Trade said March 12. CBP told the CIT it is developing within its Automated Commercial Environment new functionality for submitting and processing refund claims that will be called Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. CBP is designing CAPE with four integrated components. Claim portal. This component will be a web-based entry point for importers and customs brokers to submit refund claims (called declarations). Once declarations are submitted ACE will conduct file validations (e.g., that all required information is included and the filer is the importer of record) as well as entry validations (e.g., that the listed entry summaries appear in ACE). CBP said this component was 70 percent complete as of March 11, with the user interface done and work continuing on the programming necessary to run the validations and provide error information to filers. Mass processing. This component will automatically remove any applicable IEEPA HTSUS numbers from the entry summaries submitted to and validated by the claim portal component and then run the duty calculation validations. This component was 40 percent complete as of March 11, with CBP now focused on the automated entry summary process and related validations. Liquidation/reliquidation. This component will automatically set entries identified in accepted declarations to liquidate or reliquidate on a specified number of days from the acceptance date, allowing CBP to conduct a manual review as needed. CBP is also working on functionality to streamline any required agency review. Development of this component was estimated to be 80 percent complete as of March 11, with performance testing to shortly. Refund. Once entry summaries in accepted declarations reach the scheduled liquidation or reliquidation date they will be directed to a CAPE-specific refund process within the ACE collections refunds module. This component will consolidate refunds by liquidation or reliquidation date and IOR or its designee. As of March 11 development of this component was estimated to be 60 percent complete, with performance testing of the refund consolidation process ongoing and plans to complete in the next few weeks additional development to further integrate this and other CAPE components. CBP said it expects that in its first phase of development CAPE will be able to process the majority of formal and informal entries on which IEEPA duties were paid other than (1) unliquidated entries subject to antidumping or countervailing duties, (2) entries for which the liquidation status in ACE is ?usped,??xted,?or ?nder review,?and (3) certain other entry types such as warehouse withdrawals, entries designated on a drawback claim, etc. More functionality is planned for subsequent phases to address these more complicated scenarios.
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Tariffs Today: CBP Reports Progress on Refund Process..
