Trump Admin Says It Cannot Meet Court’s Massive $166 Billion Tariff Refund Order ... Because Computer Problems ...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) informed the Court of International Trade on Friday that it is currently unable to comply with a judicial order to immediately strip special emergency duties from millions of import entries.

In a formal declaration filed March 6, Brandon Lord, Executive Director of CBP’s Trade Programs Directorate, stated that the agency faces an “unprecedented volume” of refunds following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.

The agency’s primary software, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), is programmed to automatically finalize entries every Friday at 2:00 AM.

“CBP does not have the capability of separating out which entries scheduled to liquidate are subject to IEEPA duties from those that are not,” Lord stated. He noted that roughly 339,000 entries containing these duties were already set to finalize early Friday morning.

To manually process the refunds using current systems, CBP estimated it would take more than 4.4 million man-hours. Lord warned that such an effort would force the agency to abandon other critical missions, such as national security screenings and detecting trade fraud.

The Challenges of Mass Refunds
The agency identified several specific complications in returning the money:

Reporting Errors: Importers often bundle different types of duties together on a single line, meaning CBP officers must manually calculate and subtract the IEEPA portion for each entry.

System Limits: The current ACE system can only process 10,000 lines at a time. The court order affects over 1.6 billion individual entry lines.

Electronic Payment Issues: A new rule requires all refunds to be electronic, yet only about 21,000 out of 330,000 affected importers have set up the necessary accounts to receive funds.

Interest Calculations: Law requires the government to pay interest on these refunds, which in many cases must be calculated by hand.
Proposed Solution

CBP is asking for time to build a new automated tool within ACE to handle the load. The agency believes it can have this functionality ready in about 45 days.

This new system would allow importers to file a single declaration listing their entries, which the computer would then validate and aggregate into a single payment per importer.

“CBP is confident that it can develop and implement new ACE functionality that will streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments,” Lord said, noting the automated path would save the government roughly 4 million hours of labor.

https://www.tampafp.com/trump-admin-says-it-cannot-meet-courts-massive-166-billion-tariff-refund-order/