Expeditors Newsflash

CBP Preparing IEEPA Tariff Refund Process in ACE

Posted by Timothy Miller on 3/10/26 4:59 PM

In a court filing on March 6, 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) informed the Court of International Trade (CIT) that it was developing functionality in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) to process CIT ordered refunds of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) within the next 45 days.

Brandon Lord, the executive director of trade programs at CBP, stated in the filing that “CBP is confident that it can develop and implement new ACE functionality that will streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments on an importer basis, rather than issuing 53,173,939 separate entry-specific refunds with multiple payments going to the same importer.”

While “operational, legal, and technical considerations” may impact the final process, CBP anticipates that refund process will involve:

  • Importer filing a declaration in ACE that includes a list of entries in which IEEPA duties were paid.
  • ACE runs a validation query on the entries in the query and re-calculates the duty owed without IEEPA.
  • CBP verifies the declaration and processes refunds.
  • ACE automatically finalizes the entry (liquidates or reliquidates).
  • ACE automatically aggregates the refunds with interest by importer and liquidation date.
  • Refund is certified by CBP.
  • The Treasury Department issues the refund electronically.

CBP’s court filing can be found here:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.19346/gov.uscourts.cit.19346.31.0_1.pdf

Topics: CBP, ieepa

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