How importer standing and liquidation timing decide who gets part of the $166 billion IEEPA refund, and why 20,184 approved claims are still unpaid
AsiaPresswire – The portal asks for one thing. Not a receipt, not a contract, not proof that you absorbed the cost. It asks for a list of entry numbers, in a CSV, uploaded to a tab inside the customs service’s trade portal. If the numbers validate, you get a claim number. If they do not, you fix them and file again.
Everything about the $166 billion refund turns on who is allowed to type those numbers in. The answer is narrower than the size of the programme suggests. Only the importer of record — the entity named in box 27 of CBP Form 7501 — or the licensed broker that filed the original entries can submit a claim. Only the importer of record, or a third party it has formally designated on Form 4811, can receive the money. And only entries that are still unliquidated, or were liquidated within the previous 80 days, are in scope for the first phase.
Two conditions, then. Not one. And in the small-business segment that has been loudest about wanting this money back, a large share of firms meet exactly one of them.
Two conditions, and most small importers meet only one
The first condition is standing. The second is timing. They fail independently, and each failure has a different remedy — which is why so many importers have spent months in the wrong conversation.
| Condition | The test | Who fails it | What the failure costs |
| Standing | Is your EIN on line 27 of the CF-7501, or are you the Form 4811 notify party? | DDP importers whose supplier or forwarder was the importer of record | Direct recovery of zero; a contract claim against the counterparty |
| Timing | Is the entry unliquidated, or liquidated within 80 days? | Importers whose 2024–2025 entries already liquidated | A protest or a court case, not a portal claim |
| Payment | Is an ACH account registered in ACE? | Importers who never enrolled, including many foreign IORs | An approved refund that does not arrive |
| Scope | Is the duty IEEPA rather than 301, 232 or AD/CVD? | Everyone who assumed the whole tariff bill was refundable | Nothing; those duties stay collected |
Take the DDP case first, because it is the most common and the least understood. Under delivered-duty-paid terms, the supplier or its forwarder clears the goods and appears as importer of record. The buyer pays a landed price that includes the duty, so the buyer bore the cost. But the buyer has no standing at customs. The refund goes to whoever is on line 27, and the buyer’s remedy is a clause in a commercial contract, not a claim in a customs system.
The trade advisory firm Zonos put the structural point plainly in its guidance for merchants: money flows through the merchant, but filing authority flows through the broker. That single sentence explains more of the refund gap than any of the political argument around it. In a typical cross-border ecommerce transaction, the carrier’s brokerage is the importer of record. The merchant absorbed the tariff in the price and has no legal route to the refund.
Now the timing condition. The first phase covers unliquidated entries plus those liquidated within 80 days. Flexport’s president Sanne Manders estimated that this captures roughly 63 percent of all IEEPA duties, and said of the rest: “The remaining 37% of entries that have already been liquidated or are being protested are excluded.” CBP’s own figure at launch was that up to 82 percent of IEEPA payments, about $127 billion, were eligible in the initial deployment. The two estimates differ because they were made at different moments with different assumptions. Either way, a meaningful slice of the money is not reachable through the portal at all.
An importer who fails both conditions — a small brand that bought DDP from a Chinese supplier in 2024, whose entries have since liquidated — has no portal claim, no protest window that has not closed, and no counterparty obligation unless the contract created one. That is not a hypothetical category. It is the standard profile of the small importer that the Main Street Alliance has been representing.
The claims that are approved and unpaid
Here the story stops being about eligibility and becomes about plumbing.
As of 11 September 2026, CBP was holding 20,184 approved refunds worth about $1.3 billion because the claimants had not supplied bank details. The figure comes from a declaration by Brandon Lord, CBP’s executive director of trade programs, filed with the Court of International Trade in mid-September. Since 6 February 2026, the agency has paid refunds exclusively by ACH transfer and no longer issues paper cheques, which means an importer without a registered US bank account and an ACE enrolment cannot be paid even after winning.
Read that again in the context of who is claiming. The programme covers 330,000 importers and 53 million shipments. Many of the smaller ones are non-resident importers, or one-person operations that file through a broker and have never touched the ACE portal directly. For them the barrier is not legal standing and not timing. It is a bank enrolment form they did not know existed, in a system they have never logged into.
CBP’s guidance describes the mechanism in the flat language of an instructions page: “CAPE will simplify International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duty refund requests made pursuant to court order and in accordance with appropriate statutory authority by providing an electronic pathway to submit valid IEEPA duty refund claims.” Every word there is accurate. None of it says the pathway requires the claimant to already be inside the building.
What the brokers say, including the ones who are paying
The obvious inference from all this is that intermediaries are sitting on the money. Some of the evidence supports it. Some cuts the other way, and the difference is worth stating precisely because it determines what a small importer should do next.
Lizbeth Levinson, co-chair of the international trade practice at Fox Rothschild, has been the clearest voice on where the burden sits. “It’s amazing that CBP has been so cooperative as they’ve been,” she told CBS News. “But one thing has been clear from the beginning — that customs is putting the burden on the importer. Customs is not figuring it out. It’s up to each individual importer.” And on the nature of the mechanism: “These are absolutely not automatic refunds. You have to jump through hoops, even though customs should have taken it upon themselves to do automatic refunds. They have all the information — they know who paid IEEPA duties and how to get in touch with people.”
Richard Trent, executive director of the Main Street Alliance, a network of 30,000 small businesses, framed the same point politically: “This is progress, but it’s not yet justice. Small business owners should not have to jump through hoops to get back money they never should have had to pay. We need a refund process that is simple, accessible, and fast.”
Against that, the carriers have gone on record committing to pass the money through. UPS said: “After we receive the funds from CBP, we have established a process to issue refunds to the payors.” DHL said it had already submitted refund requests for eligible phase-one shipments, would transfer refunds to the party that paid, and charges no application fee. FedEx went further and sued at the Court of International Trade in February 2026 for the IEEPA duties it had paid, which suggests it intends to recover and then allocate rather than absorb.
That is the counter-testimony, and it matters. The intermediary is not automatically the villain. The structural problem is that pass-through is a commercial promise, unenforceable at customs, revocable at will, and invisible to the importer until the money fails to arrive. A broker that passes through in full and a broker that passes through nothing are indistinguishable from the outside, because there is no public register of who received what.
The practical instruction that follows is unglamorous: pull a CF-7501 for one representative entry from each supplier channel and look at line 27. If the EIN is yours, the claim is yours to file. If it is not, no amount of portal work will change the outcome, and the conversation to have is with the counterparty, this quarter, while the refund is still traceable.
The $52 billion that was never in the refund
There is a second reason the refund programme has not restored anyone’s pre-2025 cost base, and it is arithmetic rather than administrative.
The Supreme Court’s February 2026 ruling invalidated the IEEPA tariffs. It did not touch Section 301 duties on Chinese goods, Section 232 national security duties on steel, aluminium and copper, or antidumping and countervailing duties. Those authorities are separate statutes, and all of them remain in collection.
| Authority, FY2026 | Collected | Refundable under CAPE |
| IEEPA (invalidated) | refunded, ~$145B paid | Yes, subject to standing and timing |
| Section 301, China | $21.56B | No |
| Section 122 | $31.06B | No |
| Section 232, steel, aluminium, copper | reduced, not refunded | No |
| AD/CVD | not disclosed in this set | No |
Add the two large non-refundable lines and you get $52.6 billion collected in a single fiscal year under authorities the court did not touch. That money is not coming back, and it is being levied on top of a tariff architecture that has been rebuilt since the ruling: a new Section 301 action covering 60 economies at rates of 10 and 12.5 percent, 16 excess-capacity investigations, eight signed reciprocal trade agreements and ten frameworks.
So the net effect of the largest refund in American customs history is not a return to the status quo before 2025. It is the removal of one layer from a stack that has grown two more layers since. An importer who paid IEEPA duties in 2025 and Section 301 duties in 2026 has received a refund on the first and a new bill on the second.
Why collections fell while the tariffs stayed
One number in the fiscal data looks wrong until you line up the timing.
US customs duties were $173.2 billion in fiscal 2026, against $194.9 billion in fiscal 2025 — a fall of 11 percent. Tariffs did not fall by 11 percent. What fell was net collections, because the refunds are netted against them. About $145 billion was paid back out during the year, against an estimated $166 billion total liability.
| Measure | FY2025 | FY2026 |
| Gross customs duties | $194.9B | $173.2B |
| IEEPA refunds paid | — | ~$145B |
| Total IEEPA refund liability (estimate) | — | ~$166B |
| Federal deficit, share of GDP | — | 6.2% |
A $166 billion liability against a $173 billion gross collection line is not a rounding error in the federal accounts. It is roughly the size of the entire customs revenue base for a year. The refund is being executed as an administrative process — a portal, a CSV, a 60-to-90-day clock — but it is a fiscal event of the same order as the tariffs that created it, and it is being run by an agency that was given no new appropriation to run it.
That is the reason the burden landed on importers. Not malice, not capture. An agency instructed by a court to unwind 53 million entries, with existing staff and a newly built system, will push the data-collection work to the party that already holds the records. The importer holds the records. The importer does the work.
The class action has a four-day hole
The litigation track has its own gap, and it is the kind of detail that decides whether a mid-sized importer should wait or file.
The consolidated class definition ends on 19 February 2026. IEEPA duties were collected through 23 February. Duties paid in those four days fall outside the definition as written, and the court has not ruled on the gap. A second gap is scope: the class is tied to the specific orders the Federal Circuit held unlawful, which may leave out importers of goods covered by separate IEEPA orders — on Brazil or India, for instance.
Neither gap is fatal to the refund programme. Both are fatal to the assumption that joining the class covers everything. An importer with entries in those four days, or with India-origin goods, needs an individual case to protect the claim, and the practical deadline for deciding is set by the liquidation clock rather than by the class.
The line item that went out and is not coming back
There is one more group in this chain, and it is the only one with no standing at all: the customers who paid the surcharge.
During 2025 a large number of US retailers began adding a separate line to invoices and receipts labelled as a tariff surcharge. It was itemised, visible and priced at the duty rate. When the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA tariffs, those surcharges had already been collected from consumers, and consumers cannot file a CAPE claim — the programme is restricted to importers of record, and a shopper is not one.
At least one US consumer-products company has disclosed putative class actions over IEEPA refunds it received, according to trade counsel tracking the filings. The legal theory is straightforward: if the retailer collected a separately itemised tariff surcharge and then recovered the underlying duty from CBP, it has been paid twice for the same cost. Whether that survives a motion to dismiss depends on how the surcharge was described at the point of sale, which is why the wording on a 2025 invoice has become a litigation document.
For an importer, this is a live risk rather than a curiosity. A firm that itemised the tariff as a surcharge, recovered the duty, and did not adjust prices downstream now holds a sum that a plaintiff will characterise as unjust enrichment. A firm that absorbed the duty into its landed price and never mentioned it on an invoice faces nothing, because there was no separately identifiable charge to disgorge.
| How the duty was presented in 2025 | Refund received | Downstream exposure |
| Absorbed into the shelf price, never itemised | Yes, if standing and timing allow | Low |
| Itemised as a separate tariff surcharge | Yes, subject to the same conditions | Class action risk |
| Passed to a DDP supplier as part of a landed cost | No standing | Contract claim only |
| Paid by a broker as importer of record | Paid to the broker | Pass-through negotiation |
The pattern is uncomfortable. The importers with the cleanest legal position on the refund are the ones who never told their customers there was a tariff. The ones who were transparent about it are the ones now exposed. That is a function of how the refund programme was designed, not of anyone’s conduct, but it is the kind of detail that will shape how companies disclose tariffs in the next round.
Sourcing and ethics note
The quotations in this article are from published interviews, corporate statements and court filings, not from interviews conducted for it. Levinson and Manders spoke to CBS News; Trent’s statement was issued through the Main Street Alliance; the UPS and DHL positions are their own published statements; the Zonos formulation is translated from its merchant guidance. The 20,184 figure and the $1.3 billion value come from a CBP declaration filed with the Court of International Trade, as reported by trade counsel.
No importer is named in this article, and none is described in a way that would allow identification. The DDP scenario is a structural description drawn from published guidance, not a case study of a specific firm. Where a number is an estimate — the $166 billion total, the 63 percent and 82 percent eligibility shares — it is labelled as one, because those three figures do not agree and the disagreement is itself part of the story.
Three documents that decide it
For an importer trying to work out whether any of this money is reachable, the answer is in three documents and none of them is the portal.
- The CF-7501 for one entry per supplier channel. Line 27 is the whole question. If the EIN is not yours, stop filing and start negotiating.
- The ACE importer sub-account, notify parties tab. A broker or carrier listed there can receive your refund under Form 4811 even when you are the importer of record. Most importers have never opened this tab.
- The liquidation date for each entry. Unliquidated or within 80 days goes through the portal. Anything older goes through a protest or a lawyer, and the window on both is closing.
The refund is real. It is the largest the United States has ever issued, and 330,000 importers are entitled to some part of it. What it is not is automatic, and the difference between the importers who recover and the ones who do not is almost never the size of the claim. It is whether the paperwork was in their name when the duty was paid.
Sources
- CBS News 🔗 — “Trump administration launches tariff refund portal. Here’s what to know,” interviews with Lizbeth Levinson and Sanne Manders, April 2026
- Xinhua 🔗 — “U.S. gov’t begins refunding tariffs to businesses”, 20 April 2026
- JETRO 🔗 — “US & Multilateral Trade and Policy Developments”, June 2026, CAPE process and Section 232 changes
- Chang Law Group 🔗 — CAPE Phase 3, the class action definition gap, and CBP’s 20,184 held refunds, 21 October 2026
- Zonos 🔗 — merchant guidance on IEEPA refunds and importer-of-record standing, 2026
- Landed Fees 🔗 — “IEEPA Tariff Refunds Through the CAPE Tool: What FBA and Small Importers Actually Get Back”, 2026
- ES-003 🔗 — “Am I the Importer of Record?”, carrier pass-through statements from UPS and DHL, 2026
- IEEPA Tariff Recovery 🔗 — eligibility FAQ, Section 301 and 232 exclusions, 2026
- US Customs and Border Protection 🔗 — CAPE guidance and ACE portal documentation（site home）
- US Department of the Treasury 🔗 — Monthly Treasury Statement, customs duties by fiscal year（site home）
- Office of the United States Trade Representative 🔗 — Section 301 determinations and reciprocal trade agreement notices, 2026（site home）