What is CAPE? CBP's IEEPA refund portal explained

The five-second answer

If you imported into the United States and paid an IEEPA-coded duty under any of the nine executive orders that imposed them between February 1, 2025 and February 20, 2026, you are owed a refund. CAPE is how you ask CBP for it. You upload a CSV of your eligible entries to ACE, CBP validates it against its own data and the Federal Register schedule of struck-down rates, re-liquidates each entry, and remits the refund to your ACH account. Statutory interest accrues from the original deposit date.

What you cannot do through CAPE: claim refunds on Section 301 China duties, Section 232 steel/aluminium/auto duties, AD/CVD orders, MPF, HMF, or the new Section 122 15% global tariff that replaced IEEPA on March 14, 2026. None of those were touched by SCOTUS.

How we got here: Learning Resources v. Trump, the SCOTUS ruling

Throughout 2025 the Trump administration used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) as the legal basis for at least nine separate tariff-imposing executive orders — the original "fentanyl" tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China; the "reciprocal" baseline-and-country-specific tariff regime announced on April 2, 2025; subsequent country adjustments; and several escalation orders. These were not Section 232 (national-security trade) or Section 301 (unfair-trade-practice) measures. They were emergency tariffs declared under a statute that, until 2025, no president had ever used to tax imports.

Learning Resources, Inc. — an Illinois-based educational toy importer — sued in 2025, joined by V.O.S. Selections and a dozen state attorneys general. The case rocketed to the Supreme Court on a writ of certiorari before judgement. On February 20, 2026, in a 6-3 opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court held that IEEPA does not authorise the imposition of customs duties — that the statute's "regulate importation" clause does not silently confer a taxing power, and that the major-questions doctrine forbids reading such authority into ambiguous text. The struck orders were declared void ab initio.

One business day later, the President signed Executive Order 14389 ("Termination of IEEPA Tariff Authorities"), which formally rescinded all nine implementing EOs and directed CBP to stand up a refund mechanism within 60 days. CBP's response was CAPE, launched on the 60th day — April 20, 2026.

The refundable pool, per the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, sits between $166B and $179B across roughly 330,000 importer-of-record numbers. The midpoint is the figure most lawyers and trade press now cite: $166B.

How the refund flow actually works inside ACE

CAPE is not a standalone application. It is a new module inside the ACE Secure Portal — the same portal you (or your broker) already use for entry summaries, ABI submissions and ACE reports. CBP's design choice was deliberate: they wanted a refund mechanism that did not require a new authentication system, a new identity proofing process, or a new ABI message set. The trade-off is that CAPE inherits all of ACE's existing usability quirks.

The end-to-end flow looks like this:

1. Pull your ACE ITRAC export. ITRAC (the Importer Trade Activity report) is the canonical CBP-published view of your entries. It includes entry number, line number, HTS, country of origin, entered value, MPF, HMF, and duty paid by tariff component. You need this for any refund work.
2. Identify eligible entries. An entry is Phase-1 eligible if it (a) contains at least one line on which IEEPA duty was paid, and (b) is either unliquidated or was liquidated within the 80 days preceding April 20, 2026. CBP's CBP IEEPA Duty Refunds page maintains the live status table.
3. Build the CAPE CSV. CBP's published template (per CSMS #68340863, April 18, 2026) requires one row per entry-line combination, with columns for entry number, line, original HTS, original IEEPA duty paid, claim amount, and a refund-reason code. Every row must reconcile against CBP's own ITRAC view; mismatches trigger an "Unable to calculate duty" rejection.
4. Upload via the ACE Portal CAPE module. The interface is a single-file CSV upload. There is no API. Submissions are rate-limited to 10,000 lines per upload per importer per day.
5. Wait for validation. CBP runs an automated validation pass within 24-48 hours. Successful submissions move to "queued for re-liquidation"; rejected ones come back with a reason code. The most common rejection reason in the first week was duty-amount mismatch caused by ACE rounding differences on small-value entries.
6. Re-liquidation and payment. CBP re-liquidates each accepted entry, recomputes duty without the struck IEEPA component, and pays the difference plus interest via ACH. The current published target is 60-90 days from acceptance to payment. Interest accrues per 19 USC § 1505(c) at the IRS overpayment rate, currently 6-7% annualised.

Phase 1 vs Phase 2: what's covered, what's still stuck

CBP's split into phases is procedural rather than legal. The SCOTUS ruling rendered all IEEPA collections refundable. The phasing reflects the agency's operational ability to re-liquidate at scale.

The 80-day window in Phase 1 is the critical detail. It corresponds to the statutory protest period under 19 USC § 1514 (180 days post-liquidation) minus the buffer CBP gave itself to process Phase 1 cleanly. Entries that liquidated more than 80 days before April 20, 2026 fall outside Phase 1 — but their statutory protest right under §1514 may still be live, depending on liquidation date. Holland & Knight's CAPE practice guide covers the protest preservation mechanics in detail.

Who is eligible (and who is not)

CAPE refunds flow to the Importer of Record (IOR) on the original entry. That matters for three groups:

• U.S. importers who self-filed. Straightforward. You are the IOR; you control the ACE Portal account; you upload the CSV.
• U.S. importers who used a customs broker. You are still the IOR; your broker filed on your behalf. The refund is still paid to you, not the broker. Your broker can either upload the CSV on your behalf (under your filer code) or hand you the prepared CSV to upload yourself.
• Non-resident importers (NRIs). If a foreign exporter acted as IOR via a U.S. agent, the refund is owed to that NRI. ACH enrollment for NRIs is materially harder; many will route refunds through their U.S. customs broker's bond.

You are not eligible if your IEEPA-coded duty was paid by a third party (e.g. a DDP-shipping foreign supplier) who was the IOR — they get the refund, not you. Renegotiate commercially.

You are also not eligible for IEEPA refunds on entries where the duty was paid as Section 301, Section 232, AD/CVD, MFN, MPF, HMF, or the new Section 122 15% global tariff. Read your ITRAC carefully — IEEPA components appear under Chapter 99 codes (typically 9903.xx.xx series) and are tagged with specific HTSUS Chapter 99 modifiers in the duty breakdown. We cover the Chapter 99 mapping in detail in our companion piece on IEEPA vs Section 301 vs Section 232 refundability.

What to upload: the CAPE CSV anatomy

Per CSMS #68340863 and the published CBP technical specification, each row of the CAPE CSV must contain:

• Entry number — the 14-character CBP entry identifier (filer code + 7 digits + check digit)
• Line number — the line within the entry summary
• Original HTSUS — the 10-digit HTSUS classification on the original entry summary
• Chapter 99 secondary HTSUS — the 9903.xx.xx code under which IEEPA was assessed
• Entered value — must reconcile to ACE
• IEEPA duty paid — the dollar amount specifically attributable to the struck IEEPA component
• Claim amount — equal to IEEPA duty paid, except in stacking-cap cases (see EO 14289 caveat below)
• Refund reason code — CBP-published code corresponding to which struck EO is being claimed against

The most common pitfall, observed in the first 30 days of Phase 1, is the duty reconciliation. ACE stores duty in penny precision, but ITRAC exports often round to dollar precision; if your CAPE CSV uses the rounded ITRAC figure rather than the penny-precise ACE figure, the validator rejects with "Unable to calculate duty." The fix is to pull the duty figure from the ACE entry summary detail rather than the ITRAC roll-up.

The 60-90 day timeline and 6-7% interest

From CSV submission to ACH credit, CBP's published target is 60-90 calendar days. The refund includes statutory interest under 19 USC § 1505(c), accruing from the date the original duty was deposited to the date of refund. The interest rate is the IRS overpayment rate, which has been 6-7% annualised since Q4 2024.

Worked example. An importer paid $2.4M of IEEPA fentanyl tariffs on Canadian-origin entries between July 2025 and December 2025, average deposit date October 1, 2025. Refund processed July 1, 2026. Interest period: 9 months. At 7%, statutory interest = $2.4M × 7% × 0.75 = $126,000. Total refund: $2,526,000.

Interest is taxable as ordinary income to the importer. The duty refund itself is generally treated as a return of capital (it reverses an expense or capitalised cost previously deducted), so the federal tax treatment depends on whether the duty was previously deducted; consult your tax adviser on Form 3115 implications if you previously expensed and now need to reverse.

Common pitfalls (from the first 30 days of Phase 1)

• "Unable to calculate duty" rejections. Caused by penny-vs-dollar precision mismatches between CAPE CSV and ACE source data. Fix: pull duty from ACE entry summary detail, not ITRAC roll-up.
• ACH not enrolled. Refunds queue indefinitely. Fix: file CBP Form 400 immediately; expect 5-15 business days for activation.
• Wrong IOR claiming. Customs brokers occasionally upload under their own filer code claiming for an importer; the refund still pays to the IOR's ACH, but the audit trail is messier. Best practice: importer's own ACE account, importer's own ACH.
• Double-counting Chapter 99 modifiers. Some entries carry both an IEEPA Chapter 99 code and a Section 301 Chapter 99 code; only the IEEPA portion is refundable. Misreading this means rejected lines or worse, a CBP §592 penalty exposure for false claims.
• Stacking-cap math errors. See EO 14289 above.
• Mixed-period entries. Entries that crossed the IEEPA effective period boundary (started before, finished after, or vice versa) need careful date-based duty allocation. CBP's validator is unforgiving on these.
• Phase 2 entries filed in Phase 1. Anything liquidated more than 80 days before April 20, 2026 will reject. Don't waste a day of your 90-day per-entry claim window on these — preserve via protest instead.

When to use Protest, PSC, or CAPE

Three different post-entry mechanisms now coexist, and choosing the wrong one wastes time and statutory rights.

Treat CAPE as one tool in the post-entry toolkit, not the only one. An ITRAC pull that surfaces $400k of CAPE-eligible IEEPA duty will frequently surface another $200-500k of misclassification, missed FTA, and valuation recoveries that route through PSC, Protest, or Reconciliation — none of which involve CAPE at all.

Frequently asked questions