IEEPA Refunds Applications Start Monday

Many of ASA’s members paid a significant amount in IEPPA duties. Those duties were ruled illegal and now we have an opportunity to seek a refund. Rather than using its own resources to provide refunds of 100% of the illegal duties, the government is requiring those who paid the illegal duties to affirmatively apply for the refunds. At present, if you fail to apply then you may lose out on those refunds!

The U.S. government has developed the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) mechanism. This is a part of the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. It is the government’s mechanism for processing refunds for Importers of Record (IOR) who have paid the duties that were ruled illegal.

In summary, requesting refunds of IEEPA duties requires a little bit of infrstructure:

• The applicant should be the Importers of Record (IOR) or the IOR’s authorized Customs broker (who filed the import records for the IOR);
• The applicant should have an ACE Portal account;
• The refund recipients should have already used the ACE Portal account to establish bank account information for electronic refunds;
• The IOR (or the IOR’s authorized Customs broker) submits the CAPE Declaration in the ACE Portal (in the form of a CSV file).

The CAPE process starts with the filing of the CAPE Declaration in the ACE Portal by the IOR or the authorized broker who filed entries on behalf of the IOR. This CAPE Declaration will include a comma-separated values (CSV) file that is uploaded to the new CAPE tab in the ACE system. The CAPE tab will be available in the Importer, Organizational Broker, and Filer sub-accounts in ACE. The CSV file, called a CAPE Declaration, will contain a list of entry numbers for which IEEPA refunds are requested. Each individual CAPE Declaration is limited to 9,999 entries, but multiple CAPE Declarations may be submitted. A downloadable
CAPE Declaration template file will be available through the “Upload” button in the CAPE tab – use this to ensure you are formatting the file the right way.

Once the CSV file has been uploaded, the CAPE system will validate the submission and provide feedback to the filer as described below. For valid entry numbers, ACE will update the entry summary lines to remove the dutiable IEEPA Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) Chapter 99 codes and duties, resulting in a new version of the entry summary. Once the IEEPA duties have been removed, ACE will recalculate the duties owed without the dutiable IEEPA HTS code(s). In general, following CBP review, entries will be liquidated or reliquidated, and refunds will be consolidated and then issued.

If your entries were filed through your customs broker, then please work with your customs broker to file the CAPE Declaration and process the refund application.

ACE Portal users with Importer sub-account access can monitor refund activity using ACE Reports. The REV-603 Trade Refund report covers successful refunds. The REV-613 ACH Rejected Refunds report highlights any refunds that have been rejected due to the recipient not being enrolled in ACH Refunds.

To learn more, check out CBP’s CAPE Information Notice.

CAPE is a brand-new system – don’t be surprised if there are some unexpected hurdles. If you run into problems with the CAPE system, then let us know (and if you solve them, then let us know how you solved them so we can spread the word to the entire community).