Feds rejecting 15% of business claims

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says about 15% of tariff-refund entries reviewed through April 26 were denied after the agency’s new CAPE portal opened on April 20. (ttnews.com) (cbp.gov) CBP executive Brandon Lord said in an April 28 update to the U.S. Court of International Trade that 13.3 million import entries had cleared an initial review. About 1.74 million approved entries were already in the refund process. (ttnews.com) The rejected entries failed “entry-specific validations,” according to the court update. CBP has said denials can happen when data is improperly formatted, a file is corrupted, or the submitter is not the importer of record or the authorized broker. (ttnews.com) (cbp.gov) The portal is handling refunds for duties collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The Supreme Court ruled on February 20 that the law did not authorize those tariffs. (skadden.com) (ttnews.com) That ruling left the refund mechanics to lower courts, and Judge Richard Eaton of the Court of International Trade has been supervising the process. Eaton had previously questioned whether importers should have to request refunds instead of receiving them automatically from existing government data. (ttnews.com) (skadden.com) CBP built CAPE inside its Automated Commercial Environment to process those claims in batches rather than entry by entry. Phase 1, launched April 20, covers certain unliquidated entries and certain entries still within 80 days of liquidation. (cbp.gov) Filers must use the ACE web portal and upload a comma-separated values file listing the entries they want refunded. Each CAPE declaration can include up to 9,999 entries, and only the importer of record or the broker that filed the entries can submit it. (cbp.gov) The scale is large: businesses and individuals paid the contested tariffs on about 53 million entries, and Skadden said the Court of International Trade ordered refunds of roughly $165 billion. More than 330,000 importers were affected. (ttnews.com) (skadden.com) CBP says denied entries can be corrected and refiled. For importers waiting on cash back from a court-ordered refund program, that means the system is open, but not yet frictionless. (ttnews.com)