Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on March 12 provided an outline of its ACE IEEPA refund programming, so far, to Court of International Trade (CIT) Judge Robert Eaton. This new ACE functionality will be called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE), according to the filing submitted to CIT by Brandon Lord, Executive Director of Trade Programs for CBP’s Office of Trade.

The CAPE Claim Portal will be web-based and serve as the entry point for importers and customs brokers to submit IEEPA refund requests (“CAPE Declaration”) to CBP. Once operational, a new tab will be available in both importer and customs broker ACE Portal accounts.

CBP is designing CAPE with four integrated components:

• Claim Portal,

• Mass Processing,

• Review and Liquidation/Reliquidation, and

• Refund.

“These components reflect both how CBP anticipates refund requests will proceed through CAPE and how CBP is structuring its development efforts,” Lord said.

As of March 11, CBP estimates that its development of the Claim Portal component is 70% complete. Lord said, CBP has “finished developing the Claim Portal user interface and is currently developing the programming necessary to run the automated validations described above and provide information about validation errors to the CAPE Declaration filer.”

The agency said the CAPE Mass Processing component will “automatically remove any applicable IEEPA HTS numbers from the entry summaries submitted to and validated by the CAPE Claim Portal component. After the IEEPA HTS numbers are removed, the Mass Processing component runs the ACE duty calculation validations.” As of March 11, CBP estimates that its development of the Mass Processing component is 40% complete. “CBP’s development efforts are currently focused on the automated entry summary update process and related validations,” Lord said.

CAPE will also initiate the review and liquidation/reliquidation process for the entries identified in the accepted CAPE Declaration. This component will automatically set the entries to liquidate/reliquidate on a specified number of days from the acceptance date, allowing CBP to conduct a manual review as needed. CBP is developing additional functionality within this CAPE component to streamline any required agency review. It will also process liquidations/reliquidations of entries on a CAPE Declaration Monday through Thursday each week. CBP estimates that its development of the Review and Liquidation/Reliquidation component is 80% complete as of March 11.

When the entry summaries in the accepted CAPE Declaration reach the scheduled liquidation/reliquidation date, ACE will direct those entries to a CAPE-specific refund process within the ACE Collections refunds module.

As of March 11, CBP estimates that its development of the Refund component is 60% complete. CBP has completed developing CAPE-specific refund processing functionality within the ACE Collections framework. Currently, CBP is “performance testing” the CAPE refund consolidation process. CBP plans to complete additional development to further integrate the component with the other CAPE components and conduct additional performance testing in the next few weeks.

“CBP expects that in its first phase of development, CAPE will be able to process the majority of formal and informal entries on which IEEPA duties were paid, other than unliquidated entries subject to antidumping or countervailing duties, or entries for which the liquidation status in ACE is “Suspended,” “Extended,” or “Under Review,” and certain other entry types such as warehouse withdrawals, entries designated on a drawback claim, etc.,” Lord said. “CBP will provide detailed guidance to users regarding the scope and functionality of each phase of development as it is implemented.”