Who Gets the Tariff Refund? Not Always Whoever Paid It

Key takeaways

• The refund doesn't follow your money. It follows a name on a customs document filed months ago. CBP's guidance is narrow: "CBP is only able to refund IEEPA duties to the Importer of Record or the Notify Party (designated on CBP Form 4811) who have their U.S. bank account information in their ACE Portal account." If the duty came out of your margin but someone else was the importer of record, that sentence is about them, not you.
• Most of the advice you'll find starts at the wrong gate. "Set up your ACE Portal, add your bank details" is real and necessary — but it's gate three. Gates one and two are was an entry even filed and whose importer-of-record number was on it. You cannot fix those now; they were settled at clearance.
• "You need a US bank account" is incomplete. CBP's own ACE FAQ describes what a foreign importer does if it "chooses not to maintain a U.S. bank account": designate a US customs broker as an authorized notify party. That's not an exemption — it's a channel swap. Your money lands in the broker's account first.
• Some parcels never had an entry at all. In a live case at the Court of International Trade, a judge asked a postal-duty intermediary five pointed questions on July 10, 2026; the answer filed on July 16, 2026 said "no entry, informal or otherwise, is prepared for the postal shipments" it collected duty on. Where there's no entry, there's nothing for a refund declaration to list.
• The pile of stuck refunds has grown at every measurement for four months. CBP's sworn declarations put refunds that can't be transmitted for want of bank details at 8,384 as of June 29, 2026, 9,837 as of July 10, 19,726 as of July 31, and 22,170 as of August 21 — carrying roughly $1.7 billion. A federal judge quoted the July 10 figure back to filers in an order and urged them to fix it; the count has more than doubled since. Nothing in four months of data suggests this queue drains on its own.
• Roughly three in ten declarations never get past the front door, and that share has stopped falling. Across CBP's sworn declarations, the count of CAPE declarations that failed the file validations has run at 37.2% in late April, then 31.2%, 30.9%, 30.7%, 30.0%, 29.5%, 29.4%, and 29.6% as of August 21, 2026 — the last of those being 80,535 rejected out of 272,029 submitted, and the first uptick since launch. Filers are not learning their way out of it. And the reason CBP lists first, unchanged since May, is "Importer of record or filer mismatches on CAPE declarations" — which is gate 2 of this brief, appearing as an error message.
• CAPE Phase 3, the rung that covers finally liquidated entries, has been deliberately paused, and CBP said so only in court. Its August 25, 2026 declaration states that "CBP has temporarily delayed the deployment of CAPE Phase 3" while it builds validations to keep other duty adjustments out of those reliquidations. Phases 1 and 2 are "fully operational and … not affected." CBP's public refunds page, last modified July 20, 2026, does not mention the delay. If you are waiting on a finally liquidated entry, the docket is telling you something the website isn't.

Who gets the tariff refund? The importer of record — or the Form 4811 notify party

The short answer: CBP sends the refund to the importer of record on the entry, or to the notify party that importer designated on CBP Form 4811 — and to nobody else. Paying the duty economically does not put you on that list.

This is CBP's answer in its own words. Asked directly whether it sends refunds to consumers who paid more because of an IEEPA duty, CBP's IEEPA Duty Refunds page says (FAQ updated 5/20/2026):

"CBP is only able to refund IEEPA duties to the Importer of Record or the Notify Party (designated on CBP Form 4811) who have their U.S. bank account information in their ACE Portal account."

And on eligibility (FAQ updated 4/10/2026):

"The IOR or the party designated by the IOR (the 4811 notify party) on either the CBP Form 4811 (Special Address Notification) or on the ACE Portal account, and on the entry summary will be eligible to receive refunds."

Even the act of asking is gated the same way:

"Only the IOR for the listed entries or the authorized customs broker that filed the entries on behalf of the IOR may file the CAPE Declaration."

Why any of this exists: on February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc., et al. v. Trump (No. 24-1287, consolidated with No. 25-250, Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc.), argued November 5, 2025. The holding is one line — "IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs" (slip opinion) — and it reached the tariffs imposed on that authority: the reciprocal and drug-trafficking tariffs, levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Giving that money back is a separate machine, and it has its own name: CAPE, the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, which CBP runs inside ACE — the Automated Commercial Environment, the system your customs entries live in. (This decision is about IEEPA-based tariffs; duties imposed under other authorities are a separate question — the Section 122 surcharge among them — which we take apart in our brief on the Section 122 surcharge and what's lined up behind it.)

Here's the part almost nobody sequences for you. Between "IEEPA tariffs were struck down" and "money in your account" there are four gates, in this order, and each one has already been answered by a document you may not have read:

Gate 3 is where the internet starts. Gates 1 and 2 are where your answer usually is.

Were you the importer of record? The paperwork already answered

The importer of record is the party named on the entry as legally responsible for the declaration and the duty. That's not a role you elect after the fact, and it isn't decided by whose bank account the money left.

Notice what CBP's filing rule quietly does: only the IOR, or the authorized customs broker that filed the entries on the IOR's behalf, may file the CAPE Declaration. That means the mechanism itself answers the question for you. If neither you nor a broker acting for you can file a declaration listing those entries, the paperwork has already told you that you were not the importer of record — you were the party that paid for one.

So the useful move isn't to hunt for a claim form. It's to establish, for the entries in question, whose IOR number appears on the entry summary. The party that filed the entry — your broker, or the brokerage arm of whoever carried your goods — holds that record and can tell you. Whatever comes back is the answer; it isn't negotiable at this stage.

Two corollaries founders trip on:

• "I paid the tariff" and "I was the importer of record" are different sentences. They're often true of the same business. When your goods moved under an arrangement where someone else cleared them, they come apart — and the refund follows the second sentence.
• This is about entries filed while IEEPA duties were being collected, before the February 20, 2026 decision. How you ship today doesn't change who was named on a clearance last autumn.

If you sold DDP or through a marketplace

This is where the two sentences most often come apart.

DDP — Delivered Duty Paid — is an Incoterm. It's a term of your contract with the buyer, allocating who bears the cost and risk of import duty. It is not a CBP designation, and it does not, by itself, name anyone importer of record. Who the IOR is, is determined by the entry that gets filed. Those two things are related in practice and independent in law.

What follows is a caution, not a conclusion: when your goods moved DDP through a carrier's or broker's brokerage, that party's name can be the one on the entry — meaning it, not you, is the party CBP recognizes for a refund, even though the duty was economically yours. It often works that way; it does not always. The way to know is gate 2 — your entry summary, or the party that filed the entry: whose IOR number was on it.

The same caution extends to platform-arranged clearance. If a marketplace or its shipping program handled the customs side, the entry may name the program's carrier or broker. And watch the calendar here, because it decides whether a platform rule is even relevant to your refund: a mandatory platform DDP regime that took effect in July 2026 governs how you ship now — it postdates the February 20, 2026 decision entirely, so it has nothing to say about the entries a refund would cover. (We keep the platform-side DDP mechanics in our brief on a marketplace DDP mandate.)

If your question is the forward-looking one — for my next shipment, should I be the importer of record, should the buyer, or should a broker run a DDP flow? — that's a different decision with a different answer, and we lay it out in our brief on the end of de minimis and the new postal entry process. This brief is about the entries behind you, not the ones ahead.

Worth knowing before you settle that decision: the same three letters carry a second, unrelated responsibility. For consumer products regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the importer of record is also the party the certificate rules look to — and since July 8, 2026 the certificate data has to move electronically with the entry. Who transmits it and who can be held to it are not the same question, which we cover in CPSC eFiling: your broker files it, you certify it.

And if what you import is apparel or home textiles, California has begun attaching a third: its new textile EPR law defines the obligated "producer" to include the manufacturer, exclusive licensee, importer, or the distributor or retailer bringing covered goods into the California market. Clear about $1M in global turnover and SB 707's producer test is worth running before assuming it's someone else's program.

If you shipped by post, there may be no entry at all

Gate 1 sounds like a formality. In the postal lane it isn't, and a federal court is working through exactly this question right now.

In Euro-Notions Florida, Inc. v. United States (Court of International Trade, Court No. 25-00595), Judge Richard K. Eaton wrote to counsel for Zonos on July 10, 2026, before ruling on its request to file as amicus, and asked five questions (ECF 44 — an ECF number is a document's entry number on the court's electronic docket, and it's how you find these filings yourself). They read like someone testing whether the standard vocabulary fits:

"Does your client have an importer of record identification number(s)?"

"Does your client in some way handle informal entries? If so, how?"

"Do you or does U.S. Customs and Border Protection have a record of any estimated duties or actual duties paid? What do those records consist of?"

The answer was filed on July 16, 2026 (ECF 47). Read it with the right label attached: Zonos (iGlobal Exports, LLC) is not a neutral commentator here — it is the party seeking to be heard in the case, describing its own operation. What makes it worth your attention is not its reading of the regulations but the fact of the statements themselves, made under a judge's direct questioning.

It opens by telling the court that the vocabulary doesn't fit: the terms "'importer of record,' 'estimated deposits,' and 'informal entries' do not map cleanly onto that mechanism." On whether it has an IOR number, the answer is a qualified yes that lands as a no — it submitted a CBP Form 5106 as part of a Qualified Party certification, but "this number is not associated with, and has never been used on, any entry filed with CBP, and Zonos has not been designated 'importer of record' within the meaning of 19 C.F.R. Part 141 on any transaction." On informal entries, the answer is flatly "No. … no entry, informal or otherwise, is prepared for the postal shipments on which Zonos collected and paid duty during the relevant period."

The described mechanism explains why. Duty for a month's postal shipments is aggregated on a monthly International Mail Duty Worksheet (IMDW) — a spreadsheet listing each shipment's tracking number, country of origin, duty rate, value, and duty owed — transmitted to CBP by the 7th of the following month, with the total remitted through Pay.gov. In its words: "No entry, formal or informal, is filed in ACE or otherwise for any individual shipment." The Qualified Party certification it operated under (CSMS # 65990231, Aug. 21, 2025) required a Form 5106 and a bond under 19 C.F.R. § 113.62 — and, per the filing, "it did not require, and does not reference, 'importer of record' status."

Put that next to gate 1. A CAPE declaration lists entries. If duty on your parcel was paid as a line on a monthly worksheet rather than through an entry, there is no entry to list — and the refund architecture, which runs on the importer of record of an entry, has nothing to attach to. None of this is hidden; the parties involved describe the mechanics publicly. What changed in July 2026 is that a judge started asking the questions in a live case, on the record — and what changed in August is where those answers went next, which is the subject of the update below.

And here's the timing that stings. IEEPA duties were collected in the postal lane from August 29, 2025 until the February 20, 2026 decision — a window in which, by this account, no IOR was designated on those shipments. An entry frame arrived in that lane on July 24, 2026, under 91 FR 37,801, which limits the new postal informal entry process:

"The process for filing under this new postal informal entry process is limited to parties with the right to make entry under 19 CFR 143.26(a), that is, an owner or purchaser of the merchandise being mailed to the United States, or a licensed customs broker appropriately designated by the owner, purchaser, or consignee."

The rule is candid about what it's replacing. Before it, "The duties were allowed to be paid by carriers or qualified parties. So far, only qualified parties have submitted the international mail duty worksheets needed to calculate duties, and all qualified parties have chosen to pay using the ad valorem method." Afterward, its own economic analysis expects the change to bite: "The rule requires that parties submitting IMDWs to CBP be the owner, purchaser, or duly appointed licensed customs brokers. As a result, clients that have been using non-broker qualified parties to submit IMDWs will switch to using brokers …"

A second wave follows in the same lane. CBP will begin a test of a new electronic postal informal entry — entry type 13 — and its notice (91 FR 38,007) states that "The test will commence on September 22, 2026 and will continue until concluded by an announcement published in the Federal Register." The notice then names, almost exactly, the parties that had been paying postal duty without ever being an importer of record:

"The right to make entry, and thus to file an entry type 13, is limited to an owner or purchaser of the merchandise being mailed to the United States, or a licensed broker properly appointed by the owner, purchaser, or consignee. A consignee who is not an owner or purchaser, such as a foreign postal operator, USPS, a freight forwarder, or a carrier, must obtain the services of a licensed broker who will act as the importer of record (IOR) for the entry."

Read that against the court filing above and the shape of the problem is obvious. The postal lane's whole difficulty is that duty was paid by parties that weren't the importer of record on those shipments — so when the money had to come back, there was no one for it to come back to. From July 24, 2026, and again in the September test, that lane is rebuilt so that someone always is. (The bonds, worksheets, and timelines of both sit in our de minimis brief; what matters here is the direction of travel.) Going forward, a postal shipment will have a name attached to it. The parcels that carried the refundable duty don't.

Update, August 2026: the same intermediary has taken this into the case that matters, and it says the government agrees with the diagnosis. On July 30, 2026, Zonos filed an amicus brief (ECF 20-1) in Freestyle World — the case where class certification is pending — stating its purpose plainly: so the court is "fully informed about the need to include those who paid IEEPA tariffs on international postal shipments in the CAPE refund program, in any potential class, or in other Court orders addressing the refund process." It describes itself as "one of the few 'Qualified Parties' as defined by Executive Order 14324 and certified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to collect tariffs imposed on international postal shipments."

Two things in that filing are worth separating carefully.

The first is a quotation of the government, not of Zonos. The brief quotes a June 4, 2026 declaration by CBP Executive Assistant Commissioner Susan S. Thomas, filed in V.O.S. Selections, to the effect that for postal shipments "the duties for such shipments were collected from the sender and remitted to CBP by third parties," like Zonos, "such that CBP has no information or ability to refund the duties directly to the party who paid them." If that is what the declaration says, then the agency itself has described the postal lane's refund problem in the same terms this brief has: the money came in through a party that was never the importer of record, so there is no record connecting it back to whoever actually paid. A verification note, because you should hold us to the same standard we ask of you: the Thomas declaration is filed as a scanned image with no text layer, so we could not extract its wording from the document itself. We did confirm the sentence exists there — a full-text search of the court's electronic records returns that filing, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States, No. 25-00066, ECF 98-1 (June 4, 2026), among the documents containing it. What we could not read is the surrounding paragraphs, so the framing around the quote is Zonos's, not ours.

The second is Zonos's own position, and it is self-interested by construction. It tells the court it "has the information and ability to assist" in returning that money and that "there has been little mention of this issue in the government's public filings." A company asking to be the conduit for billions in postal refunds is not a neutral witness to whether such a conduit should exist. That does not make the statement false; it makes it a filing rather than a finding.

One more thing belongs here, because it cuts against the filer's own case and it came from the filer. An earlier Zonos submission had described Qualified Parties as "required to act as 'importers of record'" — and Zonos corrected that itself in its answers to the judge: "Zonos does not act as an 'importer of record'; it acts only to 'collect and remit duties to CBP,'" adding that in setting up the regime "CBP did not use the term 'importer of record'" (it also fixed a form number, 5601 → 5106). We flag the retraction rather than the slip because the corrected version is the one that matters, and it points the same way as everything else in this section: nobody in the postal lane was the importer of record.

What this changes for a founder is narrower than it looks, and it is worth being precise. Nothing has been decided. CBP's refund page describes no postal route — as of our August 5, 2026 check the words "postal" and "international mail" do not appear on it at all — and a request to build one into a class or a court order is exactly that: a request, made by an applicant that has not yet been granted leave to appear. What has changed is that the question is now in front of the judge deciding the class, on a schedule, instead of sitting in the gap between two systems. If your duty went through the postal lane, the thing to watch is no longer CBP's refund page. It is this docket.

The US bank account question is downstream, not the gate

The advice you'll find most often on this topic is that a US bank account is mandatory to receive a tariff refund. It's the right thing to say at gate 3, and it's incomplete.

The mandatory part is real. CBP's refunds page is unambiguous:

"You must have your U.S. bank account information in your ACE Portal account. With rare exceptions, all refunds will be made through a secure ACH payment to a verified party, not through a paper check disbursed through the mail to a non-verified address."

There's no side door around the portal itself — "Can I still get a refund if I don't have an ACE Portal account? — No." And a refund CBP has calculated but can't send doesn't fail loudly; it just stops: "If you have not updated your ACE Portal account with your current ACH information, you will not receive a refund. CBP will hold the refund until the ACH account information is available."

That holding pen has a size, and it's growing. In a sworn declaration by Brandon Lord, Executive Director of CBP's Trade Programs Directorate, filed in the Euro-Notions case (ECF 39):

"As of 3pm eastern time on Monday, June 29, 2026, 8,384 refunds have not been transmitted to Treasury because Automated Clearing House account information has not been provided by the importer of record or its authorized CBP Form 4811 designee."

His next declaration, filed July 13, 2026 with data as of 3pm ET on July 10, 2026, puts the same figure at 9,837. In the report the court had ordered for August 4, filed that day in Freestyle World with data as of 3pm ET on July 31, 2026, the same official states it again at 19,726 — and attaches a dollar figure for the first time, roughly $1.6 billion. Then, in the next ordered report, filed August 25, 2026 with data as of 3pm ET on August 21, 2026:

"As of 3pm eastern time on Friday, August 21, 2026, 22,170 refunds, totaling approximately $1.7 billion have not been transmitted to Treasury because Automated Clearing House account information has not been provided by the importer of record or its authorized CBP Form 4811 designee."

Set the four sworn snapshots side by side:

Read the two right-hand columns against the left one, because that contrast is the whole point. Across the span from June 29 to August 21, CBP certified roughly $35 billion more in refunds and sent them to Treasury. The machine is working. And across that same span the stack of refunds it cannot send went 8,384 → 9,837 → 19,726 → 22,170.

One movement in the table is worth flagging without over-reading it. The rate of certified refunds leaving for Treasury has slowed: about $14 billion in the three weeks to July 31, about $6.6 billion in the three weeks to August 21. CBP offers no explanation for the change and one interval is not a trend, so treat it as something to watch on the next report rather than a finding.

Nor did that stack start in June. Earlier declarations report the same category under a slightly different label — "consolidated refunds" that had not been transmitted — at 1,880 as of May 11, 2026, 4,185 on May 22, and 5,535 on June 5. The wording changes, so treat the early figures as indicative rather than a clean series with the later ones. The direction doesn't change at all: since CAPE opened, this number has gone up at every single measurement.

Every one of those 22,170 is a refund CBP has already calculated and cannot release, and the declaration attributes the non-transmission to one thing: account information that the importer of record or its Form 4811 designee has not provided. Roughly $1.7 billion is sitting still for want of a form field. (Hold onto the July 10 figure; it turns up again below, in a judge's order.)

Now the part the "you need a US bank account" version leaves out. CBP's ACE Portal and ACH Refunds FAQs answers the question "My client is a foreign importer. How do they meet the requirement to get set up for ACH refunds?" in two branches:

"If a foreign importer chooses to open and maintain a U.S. bank account, the importer can use their ACE Portal account to authorize ACH refunds."

"If a foreign importer chooses not to maintain a U.S. bank account, the importer can take the following steps to receive potential refunds: The importer can use their ACE Portal account to designate a U.S. Customs broker as an authorized notify party"

The broker side of that arrangement is spelled out too: "Can I act as a notify party and receive refunds via ACH on behalf of my importer client? — Yes. If a broker or other third party is authorized by an importer as a notify party, and if the broker is set up to receive refunds electronically, the authorized party may receive those refunds via ACH on behalf of the importer." A licensed broker with a valid power of attorney can authorize a notify party for a client and can email a CBP Form 4811 to the client's assigned Center of Excellence and Expertise; per CBP, "A power of attorney is not required when submitting a CBP Form 4811 but may be requested by the Center."

Read that as a channel swap, not an exemption. The words carrying the weight are "on behalf of." CBP's obligation ends when the money reaches a verified party — and in this route, the verified party is your broker. Whether it then reaches you is a matter of your contract with that broker, and CBP does not administer that leg. So the requirement hasn't been waived. It's been moved: from "do you have a US bank account" to "whose account is it, and what does your agreement say about money that lands there." For a non-resident business, that's a real option and a real exposure, and it deserves a conversation before the money moves rather than after.

Two mechanical traps sit in this same gate, and both produce silent failure:

• Your routing number has to be on FedACH. "CBP will reject bank information if the bank routing number does not process FedACH payments." CBP advises verifying this rather than assuming it.
• Foreign addresses have to be formatted correctly. CBP requires that foreign addresses stored in the Importer sub-account view be "properly formatted, according to the foreign country's address standards."

Two ACE reports exist precisely because these fail quietly: Rev-613 lists refunds rejected because ACH wasn't set up, and Rev-603 lists refunds returned by the bank. If you filed and heard nothing, those reports are where the silence gets explained.

One thing this brief deliberately won't re-explain: how a foreign-owned entity actually opens the US account in the first place — the beneficial-ownership check a bank runs at account opening is a separate regime with its own 2026 news, and we cover it in our brief on foreign-owned LLCs and US bank accounts.

Two validations: the three in ten that never reach anyone's entries

Almost everything written about CAPE concerns whether your entries qualify. But a declaration has to survive an earlier check first, and that is where a remarkably stable share of them stops.

A CAPE declaration goes through two screens in sequence. These are not the four gates above — those are about eligibility, and these are about processing, which is why a declaration can clear one and die at the other:

1. File validations — is this submission acceptable at all? Nothing about your individual entries has been looked at yet.
2. Entry-specific validations — for a declaration that got through, is each listed entry eligible? This is where the 5.9 million entries discussed below fall out.

CBP has reported both counts in every progress declaration since CAPE launched on April 20, 2026, which means we can watch the first screen over time. Line the sworn snapshots up:

After an initial drop from the launch fortnight, that last column stops moving. For four months, roughly three in ten CAPE declarations have been rejected at the door, while the absolute number rejected climbed from 27,991 to 80,535. Whatever is causing it, filers collectively are not learning their way out of it — a 30% rejection rate that persists after four months and a quarter-million submissions is not a settling-in period.

The August 21 reading is the first that did not fall. Two tenths of a point is well inside the range these figures wobble in, so the honest reading is that the decline has flattened rather than reversed. What it removes is the comfortable story: for three months you could tell yourself the rate was drifting down and would keep drifting. It stopped drifting.

(One arithmetic note: this subtraction works because CBP states both figures at the declaration level. Do not try the same at the entry level — as the next section explains, no grand total is given there.)

So what is failing? CBP has listed the same three reasons, in the same order, in every declaration since May 26, 2026:

"The primary reasons that CAPE declarations fail the file validations are: (1) Importer of record or filer mismatches on CAPE declarations, (2) Entry Number validations (e.g., entry number is incorrect length; entry number does not exist), (3) .CSV file not in alignment with the template published in the ACE portal."

Be precise about what that list is and isn't. CBP calls these the primary reasons and does not publish a breakdown, so we do not know which is most common — the list is in a fixed order, not a measured ranking, and we are not going to convert one into the other. What is fair to say is that the item CBP writes first, and has written first for three months, is the one this brief has been about since July.

Because reasons two and three are clerical — a malformed entry number, a spreadsheet that doesn't match the template. Annoying, and fixable: correct the file, submit again. "Importer of record or filer mismatches" is a different kind of problem. It means the party submitting the declaration is not the party the entry says may submit it. CBP doesn't define the term, but on its face that is gate 2 arriving as an error message — and it is not fixed by editing your spreadsheet, because the mismatch is between your spreadsheet and a clearance document filed months ago. Re-filing helps only if the filer changes to the one the entry names: you, if you were the importer of record, or the broker that filed those entries on your behalf.

If you submitted a declaration and heard nothing back, this is the first thing to establish — not whether your refund is slow, but whether your declaration was accepted at all, and if it wasn't, whether the reason was a fixable file or a name you cannot change.

Two clocks: 80 days, 90 days, and the part still in court

Gate 4 is the one that has already closed for millions of entries — and CBP's page states it with two different numbers.

Ninety days is the statute. 19 U.S.C. § 1501 gives CBP the authority to reliquidate an entry "in any respect by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, notwithstanding the filing of a protest, within ninety days from the date of the original liquidation" (text). That ceiling isn't theoretical: in CBP's declarations, "the entry date is past CBP's 90 day re-liquidation authority" is the first-listed reason entries fail. As of June 29, 2026, 4.36 million entries on CAPE declarations had failed entry-level validations, for that reason and two others — the entry lacks a Chapter 99 Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTSUS) number used to assess IEEPA duties, or it was already filed on a prior declaration. By July 10 that number was 4.77 million, by July 31 it was 5.02 million, and by August 21, 2026 it was 5.9 million. Separately, the declarations covered 26.4 million entries that passed validation and were accepted for the removal of IEEPA duties — of which 18.76 million had by then been liquidated or reliquidated without them.

One caution about those two numbers, because it is easy to do the arithmetic wrong and the mistake runs in the direction of false comfort. The 26.4 million accepted and the 5.9 million failed are separate sets, not parts of one stated whole — CBP gives no entry-level grand total, so there is no failure rate to compute here (unlike the declaration-level figures in the previous section, where it stated both). The only subset relationship the declaration asserts is that the 18.76 million already reliquidated come out of the 26.4 million accepted.

Eighty days is CBP's operational line, not the statutory one — § 1501's number is ninety. As of its July 20, 2026 update, the refunds page sets the program out as a ladder — CBP "is implementing CAPE through a phased development approach, adding more functionality in subsequent phases for more complicated scenarios" — and names two rungs:

"Phase 1: certain unliquidated entries and certain entries within 80 days of liquidation"

"Phase 2: entries flagged for reconciliation where the reconciliation entry is not yet on file"

Elsewhere on the same page, a different FAQ describes Phase 1 as "limited to unliquidated entries or entries within the 90-day voluntary reliquidation period."

Phase 2 is the June update this brief noted in July, now named and sized. CBP deployed it at 5am ET on June 29, 2026; it admits entries that are unliquidated (or liquidated within the preceding 80 days) that were flagged for reconciliation but for which no Reconciliation Entry (Entry Type 09) has been filed. By August 21, 2026, 2.3 million such entries had been filed in CAPE and were set for processing. If you import under reconciliation and assumed the refund program didn't reach you, that assumption has an expiry date on it now.

Phase 3 is not on that page, and as of August 25, 2026 it is not running either. On our August 27, 2026 check the refunds page still named Phases 1 and 2 only, unchanged since its July 20 update. For two months that silence was just silence, and earlier versions of this brief could only report it as an absence. The August 25 declaration explains it:

"CBP has temporarily delayed the deployment of CAPE Phase 3, which covers finally liquidated entries filed by plaintiffs for which the Court has ordered reliquidation."

CBP gives two reasons, and both are about accuracy rather than delay for its own sake. The first is that stripping IEEPA duties off a finally liquidated entry must not disturb anything else that entry owes, so the new validations "ensure no other duty adjustments are made to finally liquidated entries outside of the IEEPA duty refunds." The second points back at the filings themselves: the validations "will also account for improper reporting of IEEPA duties by the trade community on the original entries."

Two things follow for a founder reading this. Phases 1 and 2 are unaffected, and CBP says so in the same paragraph: "Existing CAPE functionality for Phases 1 and 2 remains fully operational and is not affected by this change." If your entries are unliquidated, within 80 days of liquidation, or flagged for reconciliation, nothing here reaches you. What now stalls the finally liquidated track is software. The July 17 order gave CBP the legal authority it had said it needed, and plaintiffs' counsel can still submit importer-of-record numbers; the system that would act on those numbers has not been deployed. CBP gives no new date and does not say when it expects one.

It is worth being exact about where this fact lives, because it decides whether you wait or chase. Our August 27 check of CBP's public refunds page found no mention of the delay on it. The page names Phases 1 and 2, and has not been modified since July 20. The statement exists in a sworn declaration filed in one case. If you are waiting on a finally liquidated entry, the docket is currently a better source about your refund than the agency's own page about refunds.

CBP does explain the ten-day difference — just not in the answer that sets the eighty-day line. Asked whether liquidated entries can go on a declaration, it says (FAQ updated 4/10/2026): "During Phase 1, ACE will accept CAPE Declarations containing entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days. This will allow sufficient time for CBP to process and reliquidate entries by the 90th day to meet the agency's legal timeframe for voluntary reliquidation pursuant to 19 U.S.C. § 1501."

So the ten days aren't slack. They're CBP's workbench — the processing time it carved out of the statute's ninety so that your reliquidation lands before the door closes. Which makes the practical implication sharper rather than softer: if your entry liquidated 85 days ago, you are inside the statute's ninety days and outside the eighty-day line, because CBP has decided it can't finish the work in the five that are left. Assuming those two numbers mean the same thing is how a live entry gets treated as dead — or a dead one gets planned around.

A third number floats through this topic and measures something else entirely: CBP says valid IEEPA refunds are "generally issued within 60 - 90 days following acceptance of the CAPE Declaration." That's how long payment takes after your declaration is accepted — a processing time, not an eligibility window. Three numbers, three meanings, one page.

For Phase 1, CBP is direct about litigation: "Specifically with respect to Phase 1, which is limited to unliquidated entries or entries within the 90-day voluntary reliquidation period, you do not need to file a case with the CIT to receive an IEEPA refund due to you. CBP offers no legal guidance on whether a case needs to be filed with the CIT for any other entries." Note what that second sentence does — it declines to answer the question everyone outside Phase 1 has.

Which brings us to the open part. On July 15, 2026, after a conference the previous day, Judge Eaton entered an order in the same case. Three things in it mattered to a founder — and a fourth has arrived since.

First, what was planned for entries past the ninety days — and has since been ordered. The July 15 order promised that, in connection with CAPE Phase 3, "the court will enter an order that directs Customs to reliquidate certain finally liquidated entries," to be entered "in each of the approximately 3,700 IEEPA cases assigned to the court."

That order was signed on July 17, 2026, under the collective caption In re Tariffs Collected in Reliance on International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and has been landing on individual dockets since (we read the copy entered in Merchant du Vin Corp. v. United States, No. 26-02356, ECF 8, filed July 23). Its operative command:

"ORDERED that U.S. Customs and Border Protection shall reliquidate, without regard to IEEPA duties, any and all of Plaintiffs' entries that have been liquidated for more than 80 days and on which Plaintiffs made estimated deposits pursuant to IEEPA."

Three things in it matter more than the headline. One, it explains why this needed a judge at all: "it has been the Government's position that a court order directing the reliquidation of entries, whose liquidation has become final, would be necessary to provide the Government with the authority" — and then, flatly, "This order provides the Government with that legal authority." The ninety-day wall in § 1501 was never something CBP could waive; it took an order. Two, it confirms the wall was real: as of that date, per the court, "the CAPE system has not accepted for processing any finally liquidated entries, nor any entries that have been liquidated for more than 80 days." Three, it comes with a condition, and this is the actionable part:

"reliquidation of entries that have been liquidated for more than 80 days is subject to Plaintiffs' counsel's submission to U.S. Customs and Border Protection of Plaintiffs' importer of record identification number(s) … Also, for the purposes of this order, reliquidation shall occur only following U.S. Customs and Border Protection's acceptance of Plaintiffs' CAPE declarations"

Note what that asks for. Not a brief, not a hearing — an importer-of-record number, submitted by your counsel. The court adds that CBP will send instructions and "Plaintiffs need not take any further action in order to receive these instructions," that a declaration can be filed once they're followed, and that more than one declaration may be submitted as further entries become final. It also notes the cases stay stayed otherwise, and expects plaintiffs who have been made whole to dismiss voluntarily.

Read the reach precisely, because it hasn't changed: this route runs through Plaintiffs — importers who filed suit, now numbering "in excess of 3,700 cases." If you didn't sue, this order is not about you, which is exactly why the next section matters.

Second, what that does not settle. It would be easy, and wrong, to read the previous paragraph as "if you didn't sue, you're out." The same order keeps another door open: the court will lift the stay in "Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, Court No. 26-01088 … in which a motion for class certification is currently pending." It adds that "The schedule for Rule 23 hearings in Freestyle World, and in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States, No. 25-00066, was discussed as well," and notes discussion of further CAPE functionality to process refunds for "entries with open protests." A pending class-certification motion is exactly that — pending. This brief doesn't predict how it resolves, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

Third, a date for your calendar instead of a prediction. The order gives one: "ORDERED that Defendant shall file, by 5:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, a short report on the progress of CAPE." That checkpoint has now passed — and by the time it did, the case it was ordered in had ceased to exist.

What actually happened on the docket. The conditional in that same order — "Should this case be voluntarily dismissed before August 4, 2026, the Government shall file the report in Freestyle World" — fired almost immediately. On July 16, 2026 Euro-Notions filed a Form 7A notice of dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i), and the court entered the dismissal on July 17. That same day, Judge Eaton entered a procedural order in Freestyle World doing three things at once:

"ORDERED that the stay in this case is lifted sua sponte; it is further ORDERED that the report on the progress of CAPE that the Government has been directed to file in Euro-Notions will instead be filed in this case by 5:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 4, 2026; and it is further ORDERED that the closed settlement conference scheduled in Euro-Notions will be held in this case on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. EDT."

Sua sponte means the court acted on its own motion, without being asked — here, to keep the CAPE reporting obligation alive after the case carrying it was dismissed. The report was duly filed in Freestyle World on August 4, 2026, and its contents are the numbers throughout this brief. The practical consequence: if you are tracking this, the docket to follow is now Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, Court No. 26-01088. Euro-Notions is archive.

Fourth, the calendar that replaced it — and it is short. With the stay lifted, the class-certification motion is being briefed and argued on a fixed schedule. The government filed its opposition on July 28, 2026, raising two independent objections. The first is timing — it argues plaintiff "filed its complaint on behalf of a putative class just one day before the Supreme Court ruled on the merits in February 2026, and then it delayed yet four more months, without explanation, to finally request class certification in June 2026," invoking the rule against one-way intervention — letting absent members wait out the merits and join only a win — which, quoting appellate case law, it describes as "strikingly unfair" to the defendant. It closes without hedging: "Defendants do not consent to plaintiff's fundamentally unfair request, and so it must be rejected." The second objection is structural and independent of timing: that the claim "does not fit any type of class action under Rule 23(b)," which the brief argues separately as to Rule 23(b)(2) and 23(b)(3). Both are the government's litigating positions rather than rulings. Plaintiff answered them on August 14, 2026 with a reply brief (ECF 32). Then, on July 30, 2026, the court set the schedule, which has since run its course:

That August 19 argument is the hinge of the whole story, and it is worth being exact about why. It was not about whether IEEPA tariffs were lawful — that was settled on February 20, 2026. It was about who gets to be inside the remedy. If a class is certified, the route to a refund for finally liquidated entries stops being "the roughly 3,700 importers who filed suit" and becomes something wider. If it isn't, the only ordered route for finally liquidated entries stays where July 17 left it, open to plaintiffs.

The argument was held; no ruling has appeared. As of our reading of the Freestyle World docket on August 27, 2026, its most recent entry was the August 25 CAPE declaration, and no order resolving class certification had been entered. A motion argued and undecided is exactly that, and this brief does not predict which way it goes.

Two further things happened in the week after the argument, and both are worth knowing even though neither is a ruling. On August 25 the court held a closed conference that brought together the parties in this case and the parties in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States, No. 25-00066. That is the case in which the merits were settled, and it carries a class-certification motion of its own, brought by co-plaintiff Terry Precision Cycling LLC and argued on August 6, 2026. On August 26 the court held a closed settlement conference in Freestyle World.

Both were closed to the public, and closed conferences in this case have left no docket entry describing what was said; the same was true of the August 17 conference. So we can tell you they occurred and nothing about what came of them, which is the honest end of that sentence. What the pattern does show is a judge handling two class questions in the same field of view rather than one at a time, on a calendar he set himself. Treat that as scheduling information and nothing more.

In the meantime, the thing to establish is unchanged: find out from your entry summary whether your entries are unliquidated, liquidated within the last 80 days, flagged for reconciliation, or finally liquidated, because that status determines which of these tracks is even yours.

And then, in the middle of an order about court procedure, the judge stops to talk about bank details:

"It is also worth noting that 9,837 refunds have not been transmitted to Treasury because Automated Clearing House ("ACH") account information has not been provided by the importer of record or its authorized designee. … The court urges CAPE declaration filers to ensure that their ACH account information has been provided to Customs so that their refunds may be disbursed."

That is the same 9,837 from the declaration above — now in a court order, with a federal judge urging importers to go fill in a form field. Nothing in that passage is about tariff law. The tariff-law question — whether IEEPA authorized these tariffs at all — was settled on February 20, 2026. What was still stopping the money in July was documents and account details.

And here is the context that paragraph needs. The order quoting 9,837 was entered July 15; the data behind that figure had been taken on July 10. Three weeks after that measurement, the count stood at 19,726.

It would be easy to read that as a judge being ignored. The longer series says something less dramatic and more useful: this number has risen at every measurement since May — 1,880, 4,185, 5,535, 8,384, 9,837, 19,726, 22,170 — including through stretches with no judicial prompting at all. CBP does not break the figure down; it attributes non-transmission to missing ACH information and says nothing about why the information is missing. So we won't assign a cause. What the series does show is that the stack has grown right alongside the volume CBP processes, which means it is behaving like a structural feature of this refund program rather than a backlog waiting to clear. If you are in it, waiting is not a strategy — nothing in four months of data suggests this queue drains on its own.

What to do now

In order, because the order is the whole point.

1. Establish whether an entry exists, and whose IOR number is on it. Gates 1 and 2, and everything downstream is wasted effort until you have the answer. Ask the party that filed the clearance. If your goods moved by post through a duty-aggregation arrangement, ask specifically whether an entry was filed at all. (Whether your own US-formed entity even counts as a US importer of record is a separate question, and Executive Order 14411 has changed how it's answered — we take that apart here.)

2. If you were the IOR, the declaration goes in ACE — by you or by the broker that filed the entries. That's the only route, and CBP is emphatic about it because of what's circulating around it (see step 4).

2a. If you are one of the ~3,700 plaintiffs, your case now has a specific, small task in it. The July 17 order makes reliquidation of your entries liquidated more than 80 days ago conditional on "Plaintiffs' counsel's submission to U.S. Customs and Border Protection of Plaintiffs' importer of record identification number(s)," following instructions CBP sends to counsel. The court says you "need not take any further action in order to receive these instructions" — but receiving them is not the same as acting on them. Confirm with your counsel that the instructions arrived and the numbers went in, because nothing reliquidates until CBP accepts a CAPE declaration filed after that step. And note the order's own limit: it says nothing about de minimis treatment under 19 U.S.C. § 1321.

2b. If someone else was the IOR, your counterparty isn't CBP — it's them. Ask the party that cleared your goods what it is doing about the refund on those entries, and read what your contract says about duties it collected from you. CBP's own eligibility sentence contemplates someone other than the importer of record receiving the money — the Form 4811 notify party — but that designation is the IOR's to make, not yours to claim, and CBP does not administer what happens after the money lands. Treat this as a commercial conversation with a deadline attached, not a filing.

3. Fix the gate you can actually move: ACE Portal plus ACH. No portal account, no refund. Confirm the routing number processes FedACH — CBP rejects the ones that don't. If your address in the Importer sub-account is foreign, make sure it's formatted to that country's standards. Then check Rev-613 and Rev-603 rather than waiting: they're the reports that tell you a refund was rejected for missing ACH or bounced back from the bank. This is the step a federal judge publicly urged CAPE filers to take on July 15, 2026 — and in the six weeks after that urging, the number of refunds held for want of it went from 9,837 to 22,170, carrying about $1.7 billion. When the bench is reminding people about their bank details and the queue grows anyway, treat it as the live failure mode, not a formality. If you're a foreign importer without a US account, the notify-party route through a US customs broker exists — go in with the contract question settled, since CBP's job ends when the money reaches your broker. While you're in the portal, check one more thing: since July 16, 2026 CBP has been moving importer numbers with no filed entry in 366 days into an inactive-for-entry status — what that blocks, and how it's undone.

4. Treat unsolicited refund help as hostile. In early July 2026 — CBP's site lists the page as last modified July 7, 2026 — CBP published a fact sheet (Publication # 5619-0792) warning that it "is witnessing an increasing trend of suspicious mailers, flyers, and notices being sent throughout the trade community." The line to memorize:

"Submitting your CAPE Declaration in ACE is the only way to submit a request for an IEEPA refund. Do not provide any information on any website that claims to process IEEPA refunds if it is not the ACE Portal."

CBP adds that it "will generally not request sensitive information to process IEEPA refunds, such as Social Security numbers, bank account details, or passwords via email or text message." Its official email domains are @cbp.dhs.gov and @associates.cbp.dhs.gov, and suspected fraud goes to IEEPAFraud@cbp.dhs.gov. Its listed warning signs: "Requests for personal or financial information / Offers of refunds in exchange for data / Unsolicited emails, calls, or texts / Pressure to act quickly / Poor grammar, spelling errors, or suspicious links in solicitation emails." Two of those deserve a founder's attention. "Pressure to act quickly" is the hard one, because the clocks in the previous section are real — which is exactly what makes manufactured urgency sound credible. And an offer to "recover your refund for a fee" collides with CBP's own statement that "CBP does not charge any fees for processing tariff refunds." The cruel logic here is worth naming: the people most exposed to these offers are the ones who can't file — the ones who paid the duty but weren't the importer of record. If that's you, no third-party service can make you the importer of record. That gate closed at clearance.

5. Set expectations for what actually arrives. Accepted declarations generally pay out in 60–90 days. Interest is included, governed by 19 U.S.C. § 1505; per CBP, "The rate of interest is determined by the IRS and published quarterly in the Federal Register." And what lands can be smaller than what you're owed — CBP says CAPE refunds are subject to "the netting of all over- and under-payments for the entire entry, as determined at liquidation or reliquidation" (it points to 19 C.F.R. § 159.1), and to "the potential diversion of refunds as necessary and appropriate to offset the importer's legally fixed and undisputed unpaid debts to the United States" (19 C.F.R. § 24.72).

It can also go the other way, which is the part worth bracing for. Asked "Can my CAPE Declaration result in a bill?" CBP answers: "Yes, at least for entries in Phase 1." Stripping the IEEPA duties off an entry doesn't strip off everything else it owes — "entries are still subject to any duties, taxes, and fees, including pursuant to other trade remedy provisions, that are applicable upon liquidation or reliquidation." A refund is a settlement of your account, not a transfer.

6. Then fix the layer this whole episode keeps pointing at. Notice what every gate above has in common. CBP will send money "through a secure ACH payment to a verified party, not through a paper check disbursed through the mail to a non-verified address." Your ACE activation runs through an email address that CBP wants tied to "your company's physical address in the Importer (5106) record, as opposed to its mailing address." Your foreign address has to be formatted to a standard. Your address isn't the payment rail — the money moves by ACH to a verified party. What the address decides is whether the records that gate that payment agree with each other: the 5106 email CBP wants tied to your physical address, the foreign address it requires formatted to standard, the account it will only pay to a verified party.

That's the unglamorous infrastructure underneath a lot of founder problems, and it's the part software doesn't solve for you — a theme we've written about in what a one-person company still can't automate. To be precise about what an address is and isn't here: a business address is not a customs address, and it does not make you an importer of record. What it does is make your records agree with each other, and make you findable when a government system has something for you. On the US side, our partner save office runs that service — Auteur doesn't operate the US service directly. If your records currently point at a home address, an old address, or three different addresses, set up a US business address through our partner before the next system needs to reach you.

This is general information about a customs and trade development for founders, not legal, tax, or customs advice — confirm the specifics for your entries and situation with US Customs and Border Protection or a licensed customs broker before you rely on it.

FAQ

How to claim IEEPA tariff refund? You file a CAPE Declaration in ACE — and per CBP, that's the only route: "Submitting your CAPE Declaration in ACE is the only way to submit a request for an IEEPA refund." But eligibility to file is restricted: "Only the IOR for the listed entries or the authorized customs broker that filed the entries on behalf of the IOR may file the CAPE Declaration." You also need an ACE Portal account with US bank information for ACH — "Can I still get a refund if I don't have an ACE Portal account? — No." CBP charges nothing for this: "CBP does not charge any fees for processing tariff refunds." For Phase 1, CBP says "you do not need to file a case with the CIT to receive an IEEPA refund due to you."

Are IEEPA tariffs being refunded? Yes, and at significant scale. CBP's sworn declaration filed August 25, 2026 in Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, with data as of 3pm ET on August 21, 2026, reports roughly $132.5 billion accepted for processing in CAPE, of which about $106.6 billion was completed, certified, and sent to Treasury — up from $100 billion three weeks earlier. The caveat is the queue behind it: 22,170 refunds totaling approximately $1.7 billion had not been transmitted because ACH account information hadn't been provided by the importer of record or its authorized Form 4811 designee. That figure was 8,384 on June 29, 9,837 on July 10, and 19,726 on July 31, and the court quoted the July 10 number in an order urging "CAPE declaration filers to ensure that their ACH account information has been provided to Customs so that their refunds may be disbursed." It has risen at every measurement since.

Will importers get tariff refunds? Many will; many won't, and the split is mostly mechanical. Refunds can fail at two separate gates. At the declaration gate, of 272,029 CAPE declarations submitted through August 21, 2026, 191,494 passed the file validations — leaving 80,535 that didn't, with CBP listing "Importer of record or filer mismatches" as the first primary reason. At the entry gate, 5.9 million entries on declarations that did pass had failed entry-level validations — the first-listed reason being that "the entry date is past CBP's 90 day re-liquidation authority," along with entries lacking a Chapter 99 HTSUS number or already filed on a prior declaration. Separately, 26.4 million entries were accepted for the removal of IEEPA duties, 18.76 million of them already liquidated or reliquidated without those duties. For finally liquidated entries the court ordered reliquidation on July 17, 2026 in the roughly 3,700 IEEPA cases before it — a route running through importers who sued — but CBP's August 25 declaration says it "has temporarily delayed the deployment of CAPE Phase 3," the functionality that would carry it out. Whether relief reaches importers who didn't sue is with the judge: the class-certification motion in Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, Court No. 26-01088 was argued on August 19, 2026, and as of our August 27, 2026 reading of the docket no ruling had been entered.

Who is eligible for tariff refunds? In CBP's words: "The IOR or the party designated by the IOR (the 4811 notify party) on either the CBP Form 4811 (Special Address Notification) or on the ACE Portal account, and on the entry summary will be eligible to receive refunds." Bearing the cost isn't the test — CBP, answering whether it sends refunds directly to consumers who paid more because of an IEEPA duty, said it "is only able to refund IEEPA duties to the Importer of Record or the Notify Party (designated on CBP Form 4811) who have their U.S. bank account information in their ACE Portal account." If you sold DDP or a platform's program cleared your goods, the entry may name someone else — which is why gate 2 comes before any advice about bank accounts.

Bottom line

The tariff refund follows the paperwork, not the payer. CBP pays the importer of record on the entry, or the notify party that importer designated on Form 4811 — and it pays by ACH to a verified party, or it doesn't pay. That means the decisive fact about your refund was recorded months ago, at clearance, in a document you probably never read, and no amount of portal setup changes it.

Which is why the order matters more than the checklist. Was there an entry? In the postal lane, possibly not — a judge asked that question on July 10, 2026 and got "no entry, informal or otherwise" back on July 16, 2026. Whose name was on it? If your goods moved DDP or through a platform's program, plausibly not yours. Only then does the bank-account question — the one the internet leads with — become your question. And even there, "you need a US bank account" isn't quite the rule: CBP describes a broker notify-party route for foreign importers who choose not to maintain one, which relocates the requirement rather than removing it.

There's an irony in the sequence. On July 24, 2026, the postal lane finally got an entry structure built on owners, purchasers, and licensed brokers — with a September test that spells out that a carrier or postal operator "must obtain the services of a licensed broker who will act as the importer of record (IOR) for the entry." It arrived about five months after the tariffs it might have documented stopped being collected. Going forward, those parcels will have a name on them. The money already paid won't — which is why the only live route for that money is the one now in front of the court.

So skip the predictions and keep two facts. The class-certification motion in Freestyle World was argued on August 19, 2026 and remains undecided. That is the question of whether the remedy reaches importers who didn't sue, and it now sits with a judge rather than on a calendar you can watch. And whatever date your entries liquidated is the fact that decides which track is yours: unliquidated, within 80 days, flagged for reconciliation, or finally liquidated. Find that out from your entry summary, then fix the one gate that's still yours to move.

Because here is the number this update leaves you with. On July 15 a federal judge spent a paragraph of a court order telling importers to go check their bank details. Six weeks later the refunds stuck behind that missing detail had gone from 9,837 to 22,170, carrying about $1.7 billion — while the same agency certified roughly $20 billion more and sent it out the door. That is what this whole episode is really about: the law can be settled in your favor and the money still won't move, because it travels on documents and account details rather than on being right. Be a verified party, at a verified address, in the systems that owe you money — before they have something to send.