Welcome to Trade Talk. Every issue, we break down what's moving in duties, tariffs and customs, and what it means for the people who actually pay the bills when goods cross the border.
We're starting with the topic every importer is asking about right now: getting money back. Three refund paths are open, and most brands are only using one of them. Here's what's inside:
CAPE Phase 3 and IEEPA refunds: the key dates, where the money stands, and why we think more phases are coming.
Duty drawback: the five-year lookback most brands have never touched. (in partnership with Evana)
Overpaid duties: the classification and trade-agreement mistakes you can still fix, if you move before the clock runs out.
1. CAPE Phase 3 is live. Here's everything you need to know about IEEPA refunds
Quick recap. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not authorize the tariffs imposed under it. That turned every IEEPA duty paid since early 2025 into a refund CBP owes back. CBP's own estimate puts it at roughly $166 billion across more than 53 million entry summaries, for duties assessed between February 3, 2025 and February 24, 2026 (Federal Register).
CBP is paying that back through CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries), a refund tool built inside ACE and rolled out in phases. Progress is real: as of September 11, CBP had accepted $134.7 billion in refund claims and sent $122 billion to Treasury for payment, interest included (C.H. Robinson). But about 20,184 refunds worth $1.3 billion were stuck for one boring reason: the importer never gave CBP its ACH banking details.
The key dates
Every IEEPA date that matters, in one place:
IEEPA REFUNDS: THE TIMELINE
Feb. 3, 2025 – Feb. 24, 2026. The window in which IEEPA duties were assessed. Entries in this range are in play.
Feb. 20, 2026. The Supreme Court rules IEEPA did not authorize the tariffs.
Apr. 20, 2026 (Phase 1). CAPE opens for unliquidated entries and entries still inside the correction window. CBP designed this slice to cover the majority of affected entries.
June 29, 2026 (Phase 2). CAPE expands to reconciliation-flagged entries (types 01, 02 and 06) with no reconciliation entry filed yet.
July 30, 2026. Deadline for Court of International Trade (CIT) plaintiffs to give CBP a valid importer-of-record number. This is the gate for Phase 3.
Oct. 6, 2026 (Phase 3, live now). CAPE opens for finally liquidated entries covered by a court-ordered reliquidation. In practice, that means CIT plaintiffs who met the July 30 deadline.
Nov. 4, 2026. Public comments close on CBP's paperwork filing for the IEEPA refund worksheet, the same filing that put the $166 billion figure on the record.
Early Feb. 2027. The two-year CIT statute of limitations starts closing on the earliest IEEPA entries. If you have finally liquidated entries and haven't sued, this is the date to talk to counsel about.
Phase 3 isn't the last stop
Phase 3 is narrow on purpose. It only reaches finally liquidated entries, and only for importers who sued and met the July 30 deadline. That leaves money on the table. In a court filing this summer, CBP said roughly $25 billion remained outside the process with no timeline yet: entries with antidumping or countervailing duties, entries tied to active drawback claims, and entries that weren't filed through the portal (Cato Institute). CBP has also said it "expects to provide separate instructions for later submissions" (Steptoe & Johnson).
We've heard the same thing directly. When we asked CBP last month about IEEPA entries stuck behind a drawback flag, the agency told us those entries "will be addressed in a future deployment of CAPE." Our read: more phases are coming, and each one will open another slice of entries. The importers who get paid fastest will be the ones whose paperwork is already clean when the next phase drops.
What to do now:
Confirm ACH refund enrollment in ACE. This is the most common reason an approved refund never arrives.
Pull every entry with IEEPA duties from Feb. 3, 2025 through Feb. 24, 2026, and mark which ones have already been refunded through CAPE.
Flag what's left by status: finally liquidated, under protest, AD/CVD or tied to drawback. These are the buckets future phases are most likely to address.
Watch your protest windows. Liquidated entries still inside the 180-day protest period have an administrative route. Don't let it lapse while you wait.
Budget for the wait. CBP's guidance is 60–90 days from CAPE acceptance to payment.
2. Duty drawback: the 5-year refund most brands have never claimed
Duty drawback is a refund of up to 99% of the duties, taxes and fees you paid on imported goods that later leave the country, whether they're exported, destroyed, or sent back to the supplier (19 U.S.C. § 1313). It has been on the books since 1789, and automakers, big-box retailers and Fortune 500 manufacturers have run drawback programs for decades as a routine way to lower their landed cost.
Why almost everyone else has skipped it
Drawback isn't hidden. It's just painful to run. A claim means matching each export back to a specific import entry, line by line, and proving both sides. If you substitute goods, they have to match at the 8-digit HTS level. Every entry has its own five-year clock. To get paid in weeks instead of years, you need CBP privileges like accelerated payment and a waiver of prior notice, and filing runs through ACE. Every one of those steps assumes you have a trade compliance team, years of clean data and a broker who specializes in drawback. Most small and mid-sized brands have none of the three, so the money just sits there.
The fix: drawback on autopilot
This is the problem our friends at Evana set out to solve. Evana built a platform that unlocks duty drawback 24/7 on autopilot. It connects to your import and sales data, matches exports to the entries they came from, and hands the claim to its team of licensed customs brokers to prepare and file. (Evana isn't a customs brokerage itself; it has licensed brokers on its team who handle the filing.) The best part is the lookback. Drawback claims can be filed up to five years after the date of import, so in most cases Evana can go back five years and get clients a big check for all of their past exports, then keep claiming on every new one going forward.
More ways your goods may qualify
Exports are the obvious trigger, but they aren't the only one. All of these can qualify:
WHAT CAN TRIGGER A DRAWBACK CLAIM
Exports, including DTC orders. Imported goods you sell and ship to customers or distributors outside the U.S. (unused merchandise drawback).
Destruction. Unsold, expired or obsolete inventory destroyed under CBP supervision counts the same as an export.
Return to vendor. Defective goods, goods that don't match the sample or specs, or goods shipped without your consent, sent back to the supplier or destroyed (rejected merchandise drawback).
Customer returns. Goods sold at retail, returned to you, and then exported or destroyed also qualify under the rejected merchandise rules.
Substitution. You can claim on a commercially interchangeable item in the same 8-digit HTS subheading, even if it isn't the exact unit you imported.
Manufacturing. Imported inputs that go into a product you export.
The five-year rule. The export or destruction, and the claim itself, generally have to happen within five years of the import date. Every month you wait, the oldest entries fall out of reach.
One note on IEEPA: duties paid under IEEPA come back through CAPE, not drawback, and entries tied to a drawback claim are excluded from CAPE. CBP's guidance is to file the CAPE declaration first (CBP CSMS #68340863). Drawback picks up the rest, including regular duties and many Section 301 tariffs. If you're not sure what you're leaving on the table, Evana can run a drawback estimate on your own data.
The third refund opportunity doesn't make headlines because it comes from your own entries. With Section 301, 232 and 122 tariffs stacked on the same shipments over the past two years, entry summaries have gotten more complex than ever, and that means more errors. The common ones:
Misclassification. The wrong HTS code can mean a higher duty rate, or a Chapter 99 tariff that never should have applied.
Missed trade-agreement preference. Goods that qualified for USMCA or another free trade agreement but were entered at the full rate.
Overstated value. Paying duty on charges that aren't dutiable, or on the full value of a product when an additional tariff applies only to its metal content.
You can get that money back, but only through the right channel and only before the window closes. And the clock runs separately for each entry, so one recurring mistake across 400 entries is really 400 separate deadlines.
THREE WAYS TO FIX AN OVERPAYMENT
Post-summary correction (before liquidation). The cheapest fix. File it in ACE within 270 days of entry and at least 15 days before the entry's scheduled liquidation date. CBP usually liquidates about 314 days after entry.
Protest (after liquidation). Once an entry liquidates, you have 180 days to file a protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514.
Post-importation FTA claim (within one year). If goods qualified for a trade agreement but you didn't claim it at entry, you have one year from import to claim it under 19 U.S.C. § 1520(d). For USMCA goods, that refund can include the merchandise processing fee too.
What to do: pull the last 12 months of entry summaries and check the HTS codes, the Chapter 99 lines and the preference claims on your highest-duty SKUs. Anything still unliquidated is the easy win.
Keep an eye on
The next CAPE deployment, which CBP has said will cover entries currently held back by drawback flags. The Nov. 4 comment deadline on CBP's refund worksheet. And the Federal Circuit's ruling on the government's appeal of the refund order, which will decide how much room non-plaintiffs have to recover finally liquidated entries. We'll cover each one as it moves.
Got questions? Drop a comment below. Ask our licensed customs brokers, and they'll get right back to you here in the comments.
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Trade, tariffs, and duties — explained plainly.