A little under a week after its launch, Customs and Border Protection’s online portal for processing tariff refunds accepted about 21 percent of the total entries that were entered as subject to President Donald Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duties.
About 3 percent have now entered the refund stage of the process within the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) portal, according to an update from CBP executive director of trade programs Brandon Lord. The first of the refunds should hit importers’ accounts by May 11.
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Lord, who is mandated to report to the Court of International Trade (CIT) on the Phase 1 rollout of CAPE, said that 75,306 refund declarations had been filed as of 8 p.m. on Sunday. Each declaration can cover multiple entries, and 47,315 were designated as properly filed.
Of the 11,222,927 entries that successfully passed the file validations stage, 2,124,394 entries—about 19 percent—were rejected on the basis of failing entry-specific validations. Meanwhile, 1,740,000 of those entries that passed the file validations stage (about 15 percent) have been liquidated and are in the process of being refunded.
In his filing with the court, Lord emphasized that “the CAPE functionality is working successfully.” The only time the system has gone offline was during an 18-minute pause on April 20—the day it launched—wherein operators had to reconfigure some of the site’s resources, he said.
CIT Judge Richard K. Eaton responded to Lord’s report with some lingering concerns, however.
At a closed-door conference on April 28, the court and participants discussed the user experience, revealing that several bugs and hurdles remain.
Some users are having trouble accessing CBP’s import and export processing system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), because they had to reset usernames and passwords, for example. Others said training events for the CAPE portal were over-registered, and some said there was confusion about which importers should make CAPE declarations. CAPE users seeking tariff refunds also raised questions about the interest rate that would be applied to those refunds, and the methods CBP is using to calculate interest.
Eaton said CBP must issue guidance on these issues for the importers, including by updating the Frequently Asked Questions section of the CAPE website.
While CBP is currently focused on Phase 1 of the CAPE rollout, importers expressed interest in how certain categories that aren’t part of this phase will be treated. Some were concerned that IEEPA duties are still being collected on reconciliation entries “when, for example, the value of an entry is increased which results in an adjustment to the duties.” They also raised questions about certain suspended entries and finally liquidated entries.
Eaton ordered Lord to file another short progress report on the Phase 1 deployment on May 12.
