U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has developed a four-step process to refund fees to importers paid under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs, which were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court last month. This information comes from documents CBP submitted to the U.S. Court of International Trade on Thursday.documents。

CBP stated it is advancing the phased development of a new feature within the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), a digital portal used to complete customs entries, which will calculate and refund fees paid under the now-invalidated tariffs to importers.

This process, called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE), includes four steps: claim submission, batch processing, review and liquidation/re-liquidation, and refund delivery.

CBP Advances IEEPA Tariff Refund Process

CBP is building a dedicated system for IEEPA tariff refunds, with the development stages of its four steps described below.

Step one: importers must submit refund requests through a dedicated claims portal, and the system will perform two validation measures to ensure all necessary information is provided and accurate. If an entry record does not meet requirements, the importer can view the issue and resubmit, in some cases through a separate claim.

Once a request is submitted and validated, the system will remove IEEPA tariffs from all entry records and run standard validation procedures to calculate the total duties owed without IEEPA tariffs. Among the four phases, this process is currently in the earliest development stage, with CBP stating that current efforts focus on automating the entry summary update process.

After entry records pass batch processing, the system will automatically schedule liquidation, set at "a specified number of days from the acceptance date," though CBP did not disclose the exact number of days. At this stage, the system will also update underlying entry records to reflect the new total duties paid and calculate interest.

Once liquidation is complete, entry records will enter the CAPE-specific refund process, which will consolidate refunds by liquidation date and electronically transfer funds back to importer accounts.

Last week, the U.S. Court of International Tradeordered CBPto liquidate unprocessed entry records and re-liquidate records not yet finalized, "without regard" to IEEPA tariffs. This is the first time the court has issued instructions on refunds.

However, CBP stated that due to technical and operational deficiencies, itcannot immediately executethe court order, and said it is working to resolve these issues. CBP added that it plans to develop and implement a refund disbursement process within 45 days. In response, the court stayed the original order while requiring CBP to submit a progress report by Thursday.

After submitting the report on Thursday,the court extendedthe stay, and required CBP to submit another progress report by March 19 at 2:00 PM (Eastern Time).