On Thursday, March 19, Brandon Lord, the executive director of Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) trade policy and programs directorate, provided a filing to the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) outlining the progress CBP has made toward providing a refund recovery of International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duties to importers.
The Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) functionality within the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) is intended to streamline the recovery of IEEPA tariffs collected between February 2025 and February 2026.
CAPE consists of four integrated components currently under development:
- Claim portal: Seventy-three percent complete (previously 70%)
- Mass processing: Forty-five percent complete (previously 40%)
- Review and liquidation/reliquidation: Eighty percent complete (no change)
- Refund processing: Sixty-three percent complete (previously 60%)
Under the current design, importers or brokers will submit required data elements to CAPE via a comma-separated values (CSV) upload. These submissions will undergo system validation, after which ACE will perform mass updates to remove applicable IEEPA duties. CBP may conduct an additional validation step prior to liquidation or reliquidation.
Upon completion, refund instructions will be issued to the treasury for payment. Importers must have an active ACE portal account with an automated clearing house (ACH) refund authorization completed, either by providing U.S. bank account details or designating a third-party CBP Form 4811 to receive funds electronically on their behalf.
CBP has indicated that CAPE will be deployed in phases. Accordingly, certain entries may not be eligible for immediate processing at launch, including antidumping or countervailing duty entries; entries with suspended, extended or under-review liquidation status; warehouse withdrawals; entries associated with drawback claims; and entries that have already reached final liquidation.
In a March 20 filing, Senior Judge Rickard K. Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade noted that CBP “continues to make satisfactory progress toward the timely completion of a process to issue refunds of IEEPA duties paid with interest.” Judge Eaton confirmed that tariffs imposed on Brazil and India are to be included in the IEEPA refund process. The order also requires CBP to submit a status update to the court by March 31, 2026, outlining its progress on implementing the IEEPA refund process since the March 19 filing.
Generate ACE Liquidation Reports; Evaluate Filing Timely Protests
Liquidation is CBP’s final determination of duties owed on an entry. Once liquidated, the entry becomes final unless timely challenged. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, importers have 180 days from the date of liquidation to file a protest. This deadline is strict. If no protest is filed, the liquidation becomes final and is no longer subject to administrative review. At that point, the only potential alternative to challenging an entry is CIT court action.
In the March 20 filing, Judge Eaton wrote, “Considering that no resolution was reached with respect to the reliquidation of entries for which liquidation has become final, importers should be aware of the remedies available under 19 U.S.C. § 1514 (Protest against decisions of Customs Service).”
Importers who paid IEEPA duties on liquidated entries should promptly:
- Determine whether the 180-day protest window remains open
- Evaluate filing a protest to preserve potential refund rights, particularly given uncertainty around whether CAPE will apply to finally liquidated entries
Given the non-extendable nature of the protest deadline, timely review is critical. To evaluate entries timely, Krieger recommends that importers immediately take the following steps:
- Establish ACE portal access: Ensure your company has an active ACE portal account with the appropriate user roles. This is required to monitor entry activity, access reports and, ultimately, participate in CAPE-related processes.
- Enroll in ACH refunds: Complete the ACH refund enrollment within ACE to enable electronic receipt of CBP refunds. Without this setup, refunds may be delayed or unavailable. Importers must either provide their U.S. bank account details in the ACH refund authorization tab or designate a CBP Form 4811 to receive and distribute refunds on their behalf.
- Run an ACE ES-003 report: Access the ACE reports application. Generate an Entry Summary Line Tariff Details (ES-003) report with liquidation dates to identify entries where IEEPA duties were assessed, monitor liquidation status and quantify potential refund exposure. To include liquidation dates in the standard report, the ES-003 report must first be saved and then customized to add the liquidation date field. Once configured, importers can filter by trade remedy Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) codes 9903.01 and 9903.02 to assist in isolating IEEPA-related exposure.
- Evaluate protest requirements: Review identified entries to determine whether they are within the 180-day protest window under 19 U.S.C. § 1514. For entries approaching the 180-day deadline, consider filing protests to preserve refund rights while CBP continues development and phased rollout of CAPE.
