News / 'Great update' on US tariff refunds still leaves questions unanswered

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Importers may now have a defined pathway to submit refund requests, following the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Trump tariff regime, but they are still in the dark about how these requests will be evaluated.

Activation of the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system is set for 20 April, allowing US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to handle refund submissions in volume.

Pete Mento, director of global trade advisory services at Baker Tilly, said: “The process itself is straightforward. You pull entry numbers together, drop them into a template, convert it into a CSV file, and upload it into ACE.

“From there, CBP runs validations on the file. If everything lines up – format, entry numbers, importer of record – the submission moves forward into batch processing. If it doesn’t, it gets kicked back.”

Pointing out that refunds would not be issued automatically, Crane Worldwide Logistics added that they would also be aggregated by importer, rather than issued on a shipment-by-shipment basis.

Nonetheless, there appears to be some optimism that the process is at least crawling forward, the announcement marking the first operational mechanism to allow importers to request refunds through a centralised CBP system.

Mr Mento provided a word of caution, however, noting that the “part that matters” about this latest announcement from Customs is that “there is nothing in this guidance that explains how CBP is going to evaluate the substance of these claims”.

He continued: “There’s no discussion of documentation, no outline of legal standards, no indication of what support will be required to justify a refund. Even the validations we see are mechanical – file format, data accuracy, and basic alignment with CBP records.”

Even so, he described the announcement as a “great update” and suggested that answers to these questions would be coming “soon”. But he reiterated that “preparation still sits upstream”.