3/13/26 — CBP Building New CAPE System to Process IEEPA Tariff Refunds at Scale

CBP has now confirmed that it is racing to build a new four-part automated system, known as CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries), inside the ACE platform to handle refunds of the now-invalidated IEEPA tariffs.

In a court-ordered status report to the Court of International Trade, CBP said CAPE’s “mass processing” engine is only about 40% complete, while its review component is roughly 80% built, and suggested the system could be technically operational as early as mid-to-late April. CAPE is designed to let importers upload declarations through ACE listing affected entries, after which CBP will validate the data, recalculate duties, and route electronic refunds with interest through Treasury’s existing payment rails.

CAPE will rely on ACE-based file uploads rather than ABI, with CBP using the system to run automated checks on each claim, strip out the IEEPA tariff lines, rerun the duty calculations, and then schedule refunds on a rolling basis. CBP has emphasized that this will be a multi-year operational effort—tens of millions of entries, hundreds of thousands of importers.