Millions of Tariff Refunds Are Accepted, But There Are Significant Rejections Too…

IEEPA Tariff Refunds in Process

In its filing with the Court of International Trade this week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declared importers made 47,315 CAPE submissions for tariff refunds that passed file validations as of 8pm EST on April 26th. They cover a total of 11,222,927 entries with IEEPA duties that were accepted for the removal of those duties.

Executive Director, Trade Programs Directorate, Office of Trade, CBP Brandon Lord, who filed the declaration with the court further informed it that “approximately 1,740,000 entries have been liquidated and are in the refund process” as of that same April time and date.

Lord also informed the court that the CAPE (which stands for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries) functionality inside the government’s ACE (Automated Commercial Environment) portal for imported merchandise is working successfully. Since its launch there has only been one 18-minute interruption to importers and their brokers’ ability to submit IEEPA tariff refund declarations. That interruption happened the first day of its launch, April 20th, for an update.

There was a 70% increase of logins to the ACE portal on the launching day of the CAPE functionality. So only one service interruption that lasted less than 20 minutes is pretty good, especially for a government run system.

There is, however, one thing that could cause a little concern…

Rejected Refund Submissions

Not all CAPE declarations from importers are resulting in refunds.

Lord wrote in the court filing, “…2,124,394 entries that were included on CAPE declarations that passed the file validations were rejected for failing the entry-specific validations.”

While substantially more of the successfully submitted tariff refund claims have been accepted, that is a significant amount of tariff refunds rejected.

And there were still tens of millions of submissions that had passed file validations as of the 26th remaining for final approval or rejection based on entry-specific validations.

Rejected submissions could require corrections from shippers and their brokers and more review from the government.

Errors Exposed

According to an email blast from All-Ways, the return is exposing filing errors shippers made on their imports in 2025.

The email states:

A recent compliance review by trade analytics firm Gaia Dynamics found that nearly 30% of entry summaries in 2025 contained discrepancies. For complex entries with 50 or more line items, the error rate rose to 80%.

The review examined more than 300,000 line items representing over $1 billion in declared goods from December 2024 through February 2026.

…

Errors tied to IEEPA, Section 232, and Section 301 stacking are surfacing — particularly in complex classifications and multi-product sets. In some cases, companies that overpaid IEEPA duties also underpaid Section 301 duties, creating offset exposure where refunds may be reduced or eliminated.

Gaia anticipates an increase in CF28 Requests for Information and CF29 Notices of Action in the coming months as CBP reconciles prior discrepancies.

Conclusion

Tariff refunds are in process. Shippers need to be careful to cross all their T’s and dot all their I’s to avoid risk of rejection.

If you haven’t declared your IEEPA tariff refunds through CAPE on the ACE portal yet, Universal Cargo can help you through the process.