If you imported goods into the United States between February 2025 and February 2026 and paid tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, you may be sitting on a refund you don't know about. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has already accepted more than $89 billion in potential and certified IEEPA refunds for processing, and a large share of that money belongs to small and mid-sized importers who haven't filed a claim yet.
Why These Tariffs Are Being Refunded
On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sweeping tariffs the previous administration had imposed under IEEPA, ruling 6-3 that the statute never gave the President authority to impose tariffs in the first place. The Court's reasoning was straightforward: the Constitution assigns the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" to Congress, not the executive branch, and IEEPA's emergency powers language doesn't say anything about tariffs at all. The ruling invalidated both the "reciprocal" tariffs applied to nearly every trading partner starting in April 2025 and the so-called fentanyl or trafficking tariffs on goods from China, Canada, and Mexico. Nearly 2,000 importers, including small businesses like V.O.S. Selections, had already sued at the Court of International Trade seeking their money back, and the federal government has conceded it will refund IEEPA duties once a case reaches a final, unappealable decision. Independent estimates put the total refund pool as high as $175 billion.
The CAPE Portal, Explained
Rather than forcing every importer to litigate individually, CBP built a streamlined electronic system called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries) inside the existing ACE portal. CAPE launched its first phase on April 20, 2026, and CBP has processed more than 16 million entries through it since. The rollout is happening in phases because the underlying entries are in different legal states:
- Phase 1 covers unliquidated entries and entries liquidated within 80 days of your CAPE submission — CBP estimates this covers roughly 63% of affected entries.
- Phase 2 expands coverage to additional liquidated entries.
- Phase 3, expected to go live in late July 2026, covers finally liquidated entries, but only for importers who already filed a case at the Court of International Trade.
To qualify for a Phase 1 refund, your entries generally need to meet all of the following:
- Filed between February 1, 2025 and February 23, 2026
- Carrying an IEEPA Chapter 99 HTSUS code — 9903.01 for trafficking/fentanyl tariffs or 9903.02 for reciprocal tariffs
- Either still unliquidated, or liquidated within the last 80 days
- Free of reconciliation flags, drawback claims, pending antidumping/countervailing duty determinations, or surety-paid duties
Don't Confuse This With the Section 122 Surcharge
Here's where a lot of importers get tripped up. A separate 10% global import surcharge, invoked under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, took effect February 24, 2026 — four days after the Supreme Court ruling — as a stopgap replacement for the invalidated IEEPA tariffs. Section 122 caps any single surcharge at 150 days, which puts its expiration at July 24, 2026. That expiration is a real deadline, but it is not a refund deadline. The Section 122 surcharge is a legally distinct action from the IEEPA tariffs, and duties paid under it are not eligible for a CAPE refund. If you've been paying the 10% global surcharge since February, that money isn't coming back through this process — only duties specifically tied to the invalidated IEEPA reciprocal and trafficking tariffs are. Keep the two straight in your own records, because your bookkeeper or accountant will need to know which line items to pursue and which to write off as sunk cost.
Step-by-Step: Filing a CAPE Declaration
The actual filing mechanics are lighter than most customs processes, which is good news if you don't have an in-house trade compliance team.
1. Confirm access and banking setup
You need an ACE Portal Importer sub-account to file. If you've never logged into ACE as an importer (as opposed to through a broker), set that up first — it can take longer than the filing itself. You'll also need to separately enroll in ACH for refund receipt, which is a different enrollment than the ACH you may already use to pay duties.
2. Compile your eligible entry numbers
Pull together every entry number that carried an IEEPA HTS code within the eligible window. If a customs broker handled your imports, ask them for a report of entries filed under 9903.01 or 9903.02. Sort out anything with a drawback claim, surety payment, or pending AD/CVD case attached — those are excluded from Phase 1.
3. Download the template and upload your CSV
Inside ACE, navigate to the CAPE tab and download the Excel template. It's simple: one entry number per row, up to 9,999 entries per declaration. Save it as a CSV and upload it. ACE validates in two passes — first the file format, then each individual entry — and issues a claim number once accepted.
4. Let CBP recalculate and liquidate
CBP strips the IEEPA HTS codes from your entries and recalculates the duty owed. Entries either liquidate or reliquidate with the corrected (lower) amount.
5. Receive your refund
Refunds go out via ACH to whichever account you designated during enrollment, consolidated by recipient and liquidation date. CBP generally targets 45 days for straightforward cases and cites a 60- to 90-day window overall, and refunds include interest accrued from the date you originally paid the duty. Watch for offsets: if you owe CBP for unrelated penalties or liquidated damages, they can net that against your refund.
The Catch for Very Small Importers
CAPE was built assuming the filer has ACE access and is the importer of record — and that assumption doesn't hold for everyone. Refund rights belong to the importer of record, and if you bought goods on delivered-duty-unpaid terms where a freight forwarder or marketplace technically imported on your behalf, you may not have a direct claim at all. Consumers and small buyers without ACE access can't file CAPE declarations themselves, which is why trade groups are warning that a meaningful share of small-dollar DDU claims will simply go unclaimed. If you're not sure whether you or your supplier is listed as importer of record on your entries, that's the first thing to find out — it determines whether you can file at all.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Skipping the refund-specific ACH enrollment. Your existing duty-payment ACH setup does not carry over.
- Filing a Post Summary Correction instead of a CAPE declaration. PSCs are the wrong tool here and won't get you into the refund queue.
- Waiting too long on the 80-day window. It's rolling, not fixed — every day that passes moves more of your liquidated entries out of Phase 1 eligibility.
- Missing the underlying statute of limitations. Claims tied to the Court of International Trade litigation generally need to be preserved within two years of the original duty payment, which puts the outer boundary around February 2027 for the earliest entries.
Recording the Refund in Your Books
A tariff refund isn't just a cash inflow — it's a correction to inventory or cost-of-goods-sold that was overstated when you originally recorded the shipment. The cleanest way to handle it is to book the refund against the same account where the duty was originally expensed or capitalized, tagged to the specific entry number, so your landed-cost history for that inventory lot stays accurate rather than showing a mystery credit. This is exactly the kind of adjustment that gets messy in spreadsheet-based bookkeeping, where the original duty charge and the refund six months later live in different files with no shared reference. Plain-text accounting keeps the two connected: you can tag a refund transaction with the same entry number or PO reference as the original duty line, and query your full ledger to confirm every claimed refund actually matches a real prior expense.
Keep Your Import Records Auditable
Between the CAPE filing window, the Section 122 surcharge expiration, and the ongoing Court of International Trade litigation, small importers have a lot of moving pieces to track over the next year. Beancount.io gives you plain-text accounting that keeps every duty payment, refund, and landed-cost adjustment in a version-controlled ledger you can audit line by line — no black box, no vendor lock-in. Check the docs to see how tagging and querying work, or get started for free and keep your import finances as transparent as your code.