Right now about $1.7 billion in tariff refunds is sitting at Customs and Border Protection, approved and ready to go, because 22,170 importers never entered a bank account number. That figure is from August 21. The paperwork cleared, the money is real, and it can’t move because there’s nowhere to send it.
That’s the priciest blank form field in the country, and it’s the right place to start, because the rest of this story is about whose name is on the check.
How we got here
On February 20 the Supreme Court decided, 6 to 3, that the emergency powers law behind most of last year’s tariffs doesn’t let a president impose tariffs at all. The case was Learning Resources v. Trump, and it took out the big ones: the reciprocal tariffs from last April and the border tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China. They ran from February 4, 2025 through February 24 of this year, and every dollar collected under them became refundable.
Customs built a system to handle it, called CAPE, and opened it on April 20, with a second phase on June 29. By the end of July it had accepted 17.69 million entries and about $128.68 billion in refunds for processing. Payments go out by direct deposit only, and they carry interest from the day the duty was paid, at the rate the IRS publishes each quarter.
Two things did not change. The Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper and autos are still in force, and so are the Section 301 tariffs on China. If most of your import bill came from those, this story is smaller for you than the headlines suggest.
The refund goes to whoever’s name was on the entry. That’s usually the person who sold to you.
Why most distributors aren’t getting a check
Customs pays the importer of record, the company whose name is on the entry. Only that company, or the broker who filed it, can even ask.
Most distributors were never the importer of record. Your supplier was, or a forwarder, or a broker acting for one of them. The tariff reached you the way it reaches everyone downstream: as a letter. Effective this date, due to tariffs, prices up eight percent. You passed some of it along and ate the rest. So the refund is going to them, and what you get back is whatever you work out.
That’s not a scandal, it’s how the paperwork works. But it does mean the most important tariff document in your building right now isn’t a customs form. It’s the stack of price-increase letters you received in 2025, and the ones you sent.
Because it works the same way one level down. If you added a tariff surcharge to your own invoices, or raised prices and told customers why, some of those customers are reading the same news you are. A few will call and ask for their share. There’s no rule that says you owe it and no rule that says you don’t. It’s a conversation, and the side that walks in knowing exactly what was charged, to whom, on which items, is the side that sets the terms.
If you were the importer of record
Then the money is yours to lose, and there are three ways to lose it.
The first is the bank account. Refunds only move by direct deposit, set up in the ACE portal under the ACH refund tab. That’s the $1.7 billion problem above, and it’s fixed in an afternoon.
The second is the name on the entry. If you’d rather the refund land somewhere else, a Form 4811 has to be on file with Customs before you submit your claim. There’s no changing it afterward.
The third is the calendar. Customs liquidates an entry roughly 314 days after it comes in, and after that there’s a 90-day window where it can be reopened through CAPE. Past that, the entry is “finally liquidated,” and the government’s position is that Customs can’t touch it without a court telling it to. A third CAPE phase is supposed to handle those older entries, and in late August it was pushed back with no new date. In July the Court of International Trade ordered refunds on them anyway, but only for importers who had already filed suit, and the government is appealing that part. If you’d rather not wait, the deadlines to file your own case are February 4, 2027 for the border tariffs and April 5, 2027 for the reciprocal ones.
One more signal worth knowing: investors are buying refund claims at fifty to ninety cents on the dollar, up from about twenty before the ruling. That tells you the smart money expects the checks to clear, and that plenty of companies would rather take cash now than chase it.
Your broker knows all of this. The question is whether anyone has asked them.
The play to run this week
Whichever side of the entry you were on, the same ten minutes tells you where you stand.
- Pull every product you bought in 2025 where the price went up and the supplier said tariffs. Supplier, items, how much, and from when. That’s the list you’re going to ask about, and the tone that works is a question rather than a demand: their tariff cost is being refunded, so when does the price come back down?
- Pull every customer you charged a tariff surcharge or a tariff-driven increase, by item. That’s the list that’s going to ask you, and “let me get back to you” is a worse answer than it was in February.
- If you were the importer of record on anything, log into ACE and check the ACH tab today. Then run the ES-003 entry summary report, filter for tariff lines starting 9903.01 and 9903.02, and split the results by liquidation date. The ones inside the 90-day window go through CAPE now. The older ones go on a list for your broker or your lawyer, with the 2027 dates on the calendar.
Step three is a form. Steps one and two are the real work, and they only take ten minutes if your pricing history lives somewhere you can search by supplier, by customer and by item at the same time. If last year’s tariff pass-through lives in a folder of emails and a rep’s memory, that’s the finding. It was the finding in June when the $800 rule closed, and it’s the finding again now that the money is coming back.
Nobody planned for the tariffs. Nobody planned for the refunds either. The companies coming out ahead are just the ones who can answer, the same afternoon, what they paid and what they charged.
Sources
- Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump · Supreme Court of the United States, decided February 20, 2026
- International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) Duty Refunds · U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the CAPE program, interest, direct deposit and Form 4811
- IEEPA Tariff Refunds: Frequently Asked Questions · BDO, which tariffs qualify and which do not, the numbers as of July 31, 2026, and the 2027 court deadlines
- What Happened This Month in International Trade (August 2026) · Customs & International Trade Law Blog, reporting CBP’s August status filing with the Court of International Trade, including the 22,170 refunds held for missing bank details
- Phase One IEEPA Tariff Refunds Are Hitting Bank Accounts · Troutman Pepper Locke, refund payments and the market for buying refund claims
- The $800 Shortcut Just Closed · Workd Weekly, Issue #1