Your tariff refund is sitting at CBP. It only moves when you file.

Yes, and you can verify every piece without us. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating the 2025-26 IEEPA tariffs. CBP's refund process is documented on its official IEEPA Duty Refunds page, and its CAPE claim system has been live inside the ACE portal since April 20, 2026. FlatClaim is software that prepares your claim file from your own entry data; it is operated by Oakwell Partners Inc. We never touch your money or your government accounts.

Every dollar of IEEPA duties you paid on eligible entries, plus statutory interest from CBP. There is no single average worth quoting, since one importer's claim looks nothing like another's; your exact claim total and interest estimate are computed from your own entry data before anything is filed. The free check tells you whether your entries qualify. And if your filed claim brings no refund, your fee comes back in full.

No. Refunds are not automatic. The Importer of Record, or the customs broker who originally filed the entries, must submit a CAPE declaration (a CSV file, maximum 9,999 entries per file) in their own ACE Secure Data Portal account. By CBP's May 26, 2026 status report, about 157,402 CAPE declarations had been filed, and roughly 330,000 importers are eligible. If nobody files for your entries, the money stays with the government.

Probably not, and not because they've dropped the ball. A broker's job is clearing your shipments; a CAPE refund claim on past entries is separate work they take on only when you engage them for it, and brokers that offer it bill it as new work, sometimes as a percentage of your refund. CBP's rules also narrow who can act: only the broker that filed the original entries, or you in your own ACE account, may file the declaration. The free check walks you through verifying this and tells you exactly what to ask your broker for: the ACE acceptance confirmation from CBP. If a declaration already covers your entries, you are done and you never needed us.

Deadlines are rolling, not one fixed date. Entries that have been finally liquidated must be protested within 180 days of liquidation, or the refund right for those entries can be lost. Because entries liquidate on different dates, claims are expiring every week. The sooner you check, the less you leave at risk.

ACE (the Automated Commercial Environment) is CBP's online portal where importers manage their customs business. CAPE is the claim system CBP runs inside ACE for IEEPA duty refunds; it has been live since April 20, 2026. A CAPE declaration is the actual claim: a CSV file listing the entries you're claiming refunds on, maximum 9,999 entries per file, submitted in your own ACE portal account. Preparing that file correctly is the painful step, and it's the step FlatClaim does for you.

CBP pays refunds by ACH directly to the importer, with statutory interest, typically 60 to 90 days after the CAPE declaration is accepted. This is not theoretical: the first refund payments landed May 12, 2026, and CBP reported about $20.6 billion already refunded by May 26. FlatClaim includes a tracker so you know where your claim stands until the deposit lands.

Because the work does not get harder as your refund gets bigger. Preparing a CAPE file is the same job whether your refund is small or large, so a fee that scales with the refund just takes more for the same paperwork. Contingency shops typically charge 15 to 25% of your refund; on a $200,000 refund that is $30,000 to $50,000. Some shops now advertise rates as low as 3%, and the fine print matters: that is the floor of a sliding scale that climbs with complexity, and you learn your real rate only after they have seen your claim. Even at a true 3% you would pay $6,000 on that same $200,000 refund, against FlatClaim's $2,995 flat. And if your refund is small enough that a percentage genuinely beats our flat fee, the free check will tell you that too. Every recovered dollar above the fee stays yours, plus the statutory interest CBP adds.

We include a full guided path for creating one, and the same hand-holding everywhere else: setup, upload, file preparation, filing, tracking. Every screen is walked through. No prior trade-compliance knowledge needed.

Only your entry data; we show you exactly where it lives in ACE. We never need your bank details, your books, your ACE login, or a power of attorney. Your data is encrypted, used only to compute and validate your claim file, and purged after your refund lands.

Some entry types (drawback-flagged, reconciliation, and others) await a Phase 2 that CBP has not yet opened. If your entries include those, they wait for Phase 2; we keep them on a free waitlist and alert you the day CBP opens the window.

That's covered by our workmanship warranty: if CBP rejects your file for a format error, we regenerate it corrected, free, until it's accepted. And the bigger guarantee sits behind it: if your CAPE claim, filed by you, results in no refund, your fee comes back in full.