The IEEPA refund deadline: the 80-day cliff, explained

The summary

CAPE accepts refund claims for entries where the liquidation date is no more than 80 days in the past, or where the entry has not yet liquidated at all. The moment an entry crosses that line, CAPE refuses it, and recovery moves to the protest track — a formal 19 CFR 174 filing with a 180-day liquidation-date clock, counsel involvement, and a meaningfully different cost structure.

This is the single load-bearing date rule in the CAPE workflow. Everything else is mechanical.

Why 80 days

CBP's authority to reliquidate an entry runs for 90 days after the original liquidation date, under 19 CFR 173.3. Inside that window, CBP can adjust duty amounts without a formal protest. By setting CAPE eligibility at 80 days, CBP leaves a 10-day operational buffer to process, validate, and reliquidate before the reliquidation authority itself expires. Past 90 days, only a protest can reopen the entry — and CAPE was not designed to run the protest workflow.

CBP's CAPE Phase 1 Trade Information Notice states this explicitly: "Phase 1 is limited to certain unliquidated entries and certain entries within 80 days of liquidation." The rule is not negotiable and not discretionary.

Computing it per entry

For each entry in your ACE export:

1. If Liquidation Status = Unliquidated, the entry is CAPE-eligible. No cliff yet. File now.
2. If Liquidation Status = Liquidated, compute Liquidation Date + 80 days.
3. If the result is in the future, the entry is CAPE-eligible. Note the exact cliff date — you need to beat it.
4. If the result is in the past, CAPE rejects. Mark the entry for the protest track (or drop, depending on your strategy).

un-tariff's classifier runs this per-entry automatically and flags anything within 14 days of the cliff for immediate filing.

Filing close to the cliff

When you're within two weeks of an entry's cliff, three rules:

• Submit, don't wait for a "clean" batch. File the ready entries now. CAPE accepts multiple declarations per IOR; there's no penalty for filing in waves.
• Use submission date, not acceptance date. CBP evaluates eligibility at the moment you submit. If a validation error kicks back the file, you have until the original cliff date to resubmit. Acceptance acknowledgment (typically 48 hours) is not the deadline.
• Keep the audit trail. If CBP later asks, you want to show the liquidation date, the 80-day computation, and the submission timestamp. un-tariff logs all three automatically.

When CAPE rejects: the protest track

If your entry is past the 80-day cliff, CAPE is not the right channel. Recovery moves to a formal protest under 19 CFR Part 174. Key differences:

• 180-day clock from liquidation date. This is the statutory deadline, not a CAPE Phase 1 choice.
• Form 19 (CBP Form 19) plus supporting documentation. Not a CSV — a formal filing.
• Legal argument that the duty was erroneously collected. Learning Resources makes the argument easier than it used to be, but it's still an argument, not a checkbox.
• Counsel involvement is common. Protests go through review with CBP's Office of Regulations and Rulings. Some protests require hearings.

un-tariff Phase 1 classifies out-of-window entries as PROTEST_REQUIRED_OUT_OF_SCOPE and stops there. If you have entries in this bucket, talk to a customs attorney or broker with trade-remedy experience.

Common questions

Ready to see where your entries sit relative to the cliff? The free calculator takes total volume and gives a refund band; the paid filing tool runs the per-entry cliff check on your ACE export.