Tariff Refund Suite™ – Complete CSV + Excel + Word + PDF for CBP Refund Recovery (includes CAPE phases)

It is a software system you run yourself, not a done-for-you service and not a contingency engagement. You buy it once for $197, download it, and your own team operates it. Nobody files on your behalf and nobody takes a percentage of what you recover. The word services describes what it replaces: the eligibility screening, refund calculation, document preparation, and status tracking that a customs consultancy would otherwise sell you as a service engagement. You keep the work in-house, keep the full refund, and keep the audit trail on your own systems.

A broker files entries and can file protests on your behalf, typically charging $5,000 and up per claim, and specialist recovery firms charge $15,000 to $35,000 per engagement, often plus a contingency percentage of what they recover. What none of them give you is visibility: which of your entries qualify, what each is worth, when each window closes, and what has actually paid out. The Suite gives you that layer for a one-time $197 and keeps the analysis in-house. Many customers run both, using the Suite to decide what to file and their broker to transmit it.

No. An importer of record can file its own protests, Post-Summary Corrections, and CAPE submissions directly with CBP. The Suite prepares every document those filings require. Where a licensed broker or customs attorney is still worth engaging: complex classification disputes, binding ruling requests, prior disclosures with penalty exposure, and anything already under CBP audit. The Suite is built to make the routine work self-service so your outside spend goes only to the genuinely contested matters.

Three models. Doing nothing costs you the full refund. A specialist recovery firm charges $15,000 to $35,000 per engagement, or $5,000 and up per individual claim, frequently plus 10 to 30 percent contingency on recovered duties. The Tariff Refund Suite is $197 once, with every future update included and no percentage of your recovery. On a single mid-size protest the Suite pays for itself several times over, and the cost does not scale with how much you recover.

Because overpaid duty is working capital sitting on CBP’s balance sheet instead of yours, and because the loss becomes permanent on a date nobody announces. Entries generally liquidate 314 days after entry, and the protest window closes 180 days after that. Miss it and the entry is legally final, which turns a recoverable receivable into a realized cost of goods sold. That makes refund recovery a cash-flow and gross-margin question owned by finance, with compliance executing, rather than a filing chore owned by compliance alone.

Trade compliance managers running multi-authority refund programs, finance controllers recovering overpaid duties to restore gross margin, procurement directors auditing historical import costs, customs brokers preparing protest and drawback filings for clients, supply chain leaders coordinating recovery across business units, and CFOs or FP and A teams quantifying recovery impact for board reporting. The common thread is an importer with entries subject to Section 301, Section 232, Section 122, or IEEPA duties.

Everything a customs recovery consultancy bills for except transmission itself: eligibility screening across Section 301, 232, 122, IEEPA and drawback; refund calculation per entry; pathway routing to CAPE, protest, drawback or PSC; deadline tracking against liquidation dates; document preparation including CBP Form 19 protest letters and PSC cover letters; ACH disbursement reconciliation; and executive reporting for leadership. You run all of it in-house on a one-time $197 purchase.

Questions this page deliberately does not duplicate, so each page in the cluster owns one clear answer: what CAPE is and when Phase 2 opened · filing deadlines by pathway · which pathway applies to my entry · how the Command Center works · do I get future updates.