Your Customs Broker Can File the Forms. They Can't Do What Comes Next.

The portal opened on April 20. Thousands of companies filed. CBP rejected more than a third of them in the first week.

Not a third of unqualified claims. A third of the ones companies thought were clean.

The rejected filers now have a choice: spend more time and money to refile, or write off a refund they're legally owed. Many will choose the second option. The government is counting on it.

If you're a U.S. importer that paid IEEPA tariffs over the past year, you are owed a refund. The Supreme Court said so. The question isn't whether you qualify. The question is whether you actually collect, and how much you collect when you do.

That answer depends almost entirely on who's running your claim.

What the refund process actually looks like

On paper, the IEEPA refund process sounds manageable. Log into CBP's new CAPE portal. Submit your entry-level documentation. Wait 60 to 90 days. Get your money back.

In practice, it looks like this.

You have to dig up purchase orders and shipping invoices from shipments that may have moved through three freight forwarders, two countries, and a handful of Amazon warehouses. Your Chinese suppliers stopped returning calls six months ago. Your FedEx records are in a format CAPE doesn't recognize. The ACE portal requires an account you've never set up. The CBP help line runs a four-hour hold.

One small business owner documented his experience for NPR. Forty days after the Supreme Court ruling, he still hadn't filed. "We're not equipped to deal with this," he said. "This wasn't my problem. And now you're telling me if I want my money back, figure it out."

That's the design.

When the portal launched, more than two-thirds of importers weren't ready to file. Of those who were ready and did file, CBP rejected more than a third immediately. Not because the claims were fraudulent. Because of technical data errors. Of the entries that cleared that first screen, another 16% got rejected at the second stage. Two weeks in, only 3% of the total entries owed had actually been refunded.

The government also has until June 6 to appeal the refund order entirely. If they do, everything stops.

The customs broker problem

Most importers' first instinct is to call their customs broker. That's reasonable. Brokers know the CAPE portal. They understand entry-level documentation. They can file the forms.

What they can't do is everything that happens when the forms get complicated.

Customs brokers are licensed to facilitate entry filings. They are not licensed to practice law. That matters here because the IEEPA refund process isn't just a paperwork exercise. It's a legal proceeding with real exposure on both sides.

CBP has confirmed it won't issue full refunds in many cases. The agency is offsetting IEEPA tariff refunds against other Trump tariffs that would theoretically have applied if the IEEPA tariffs had never existed. That's a legal argument, not a data entry problem. Challenging a CBP offset determination requires someone who can respond on legal grounds. Your broker can't do that.

Every claim you submit goes through CBP's full multi-stage review process. Reviewers look at your entire import history, not just the shipments at issue. Given the chaos of the 2025 tariff environment, administrative errors in past filings are almost certain. When a CBP reviewer finds one, it doesn't disappear. It can trigger an audit. One CEO who submitted an IEEPA refund claim described it as "a Rorschach test" of how clean your customs records are. A broker can't defend you in a customs audit. A trade attorney can.

Then there's the political dimension. Trump publicly said he'll "remember" companies that seek refunds. Some importers are structuring claims through intermediaries to create distance. Some are considering not filing at all. Both of those are calls with real legal and financial consequences, and a customs broker isn't positioned to weigh them with you.

What the DIY path actually costs

The math on going it alone is worse than most people realize.

Start with time. NPR documented that it takes small business owners weeks, not hours, just to gather the documentation needed to file a single claim. That's weeks pulled away from the work that actually pays the bills.

Phase 1 of CAPE doesn't cover approximately 40% of IEEPA entries. Those are the ones CBP considers more technically burdensome. For those entries, there's no timeline for Phase 2. If a significant chunk of your tariff exposure sits in that bucket, you could wait months before you can even attempt to file.

Then there's the cost of getting it wrong. One mid-size company CEO had already spent $30,000 on CAPE paperwork, and counting. Smaller companies often spend proportionally more when they're building the process from scratch. And if your claim gets rejected and needs to be refiled, you pay again.

Meanwhile, interest is compounding. The government owes interest on every unpaid refund at 4.5 to 6 percent, compounding daily. That's roughly $20 million per day across all outstanding claims. The total interest tab has already passed $4 to $5 billion. Every month between when you paid the tariffs and when you collect the refund is money you're leaving on the table.

DIY isn't cheaper. It just moves the cost into the hours you spent, the errors you made, and the refund you never fully collected.

What Wall Street already figured out

Hedge funds saw this coming.

By late 2025, before the Supreme Court even ruled, investment firms were approaching importers with offers to buy their refund claims outright at steep discounts. The importers got certainty. The funds got claims they could pursue with legal resources, expecting returns of two to five times their purchase price when CBP paid up.

That's not a coincidence. It's a signal about what this process actually takes.

The companies that recover the most will be the ones with trade attorneys, in-house customs compliance teams, and the capacity to fight CBP scrutiny, challenge offset calculations, and refile rejected claims quickly. Cato Institute put it plainly: the CAPE system "will ensure that the administration ends up paying out much less than it owes," and the biggest losers will be smaller businesses without the resources to fight for the full amount.

You don't need a hedge fund. But you do need someone in your corner who actually handles trade law.

What trade counsel does that a broker doesn't

A trade attorney doesn't just file your forms. They build the legal record that protects your claim at every stage of CBP's review.

That starts before you file. A good trade attorney reviews your import history for paperwork irregularities before CBP does. The 2025 tariff chaos created errors in a lot of files. Better to find them yourself than to have CBP find them when reviewing your refund claim.

Filing strategy is another piece a broker won't touch. Which entries fall into Phase 1 vs. Phase 2? What's the right sequence? Do you file now or wait to see if the government appeals before June 6? Those decisions affect how much you recover and when.

When CBP comes back with an offset argument, your attorney can push back on the legal grounds. When a claim gets rejected, they refile fast and correctly. If the review escalates into an audit, they handle it. A broker exits the picture the moment it stops being about forms.

The number

The government collected $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs it was never legally entitled to collect. That money belongs to the roughly 330,000 importers who paid it. The refund process was built to make recovering it hard enough that a lot of it never gets returned.

One week in, with only 3% of entries refunded and 37% of initial claims rejected, it's working as designed.

You have a claim worth filing. The variable is how much of it you actually collect.