Custom and Border Protection’s (CBP) web-based portal for issuing tariff refunds is poised to process about three-fifths of the 53 million import entries that were subject to now-defunct Trump administration duties upon its upcoming launch, leaving nearly 40 percent of potential paybacks to importers in limbo.
Importers paid over $166 billion in tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) statute, according to CBP data. About 63 percent of the entries that were tariffed will move through the system toward prospective refunds when it launches in mid-April, according to Brandon Lord, executive director of the Trade Programs Directorate at CBP.
In a filing Tuesday with the Court of International Trade (CIT), Lord wrote that the system will be ready to deploy within the coming weeks, meeting its court-issued deadline, but it won’t be able to process refund requests for 37 percent of entries immediately. Currently, the components that make up CBP’s Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE), the new tool being developed expressly for the purpose of issuing IEEPA refunds within its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), are at varying levels of completion.
CAPE’s claim portal is 85 percent complete, while the mass processing capability is 60 percent developed. The review and liquidation element is 80 percent finished, and the refund mechanism is 75 percent resolved. Soon, testing of those functionalities will begin.
Upon its rollout, CAPE will process entries in phases. Phase 1 will see only unliquidated entries, along with entries that fall within the 90-day voluntary liquidation period, processed for refunds. According to Lord’s brief, CBP may take up to 45 days to review and liquidate claims submitted through the claim portal.
Entries that have been flagged for reconciliation and those designated on a drawback claim or covered by an open protest will not be processed yet. Nor will entries that have not been filed within ACE and those that don’t have a liquidation status within the portal. Entries that are subject to different duties than the IEEPA tariffs—specifically anti-dumping and countervailing duties—will not be processed. He did not indicate when the remaining eligible entries would be processed.
Lord’s update on CBP’s refund processing status follows a CIT mandate from Judge Richard K. Eaton issued on March 5. The judge decreed that CBP must begin the process of paying back the IEEPA tariffs to the more than 330,000 importers that paid them. However, CBP indicated that it was unable to process the unprecedented volume of refunds immediately, saying that any attempt would drown its current systems. Lord told the court that the agency was making “all possible efforts to have this new ACE functionality ready for use in 45 days.”
