IEEPA Tariff Refunds Phase 3: The Trade Compliance and Accounting Talent It Takes to Claim $134.7B

Last updated: October 7, 2026

By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1

CBP has accepted roughly $134.7 billion in IEEPA tariff refund claims, and Phase 3 opened October 6, 2026, but only importers already suing at the Court of International Trade can file in it. The money is real. The bottleneck is people who can prove a claim entry by entry.

Phase 3 of the refund process went live on a Tuesday and almost nobody outside the trade bar noticed. That is a little strange. The size alone should have carried it further. U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Court of International Trade that about $134.7 billion in potential and certified refunds had been accepted into its CAPE system, and that roughly $122 billion of that, interest included, had already been certified and sent to Treasury for payment.

Whether the tariffs should ever have been collected is a question for people with law degrees and firmer opinions than mine. I am looking at something narrower. Somebody has to do the work of claiming this, and the work is harder to staff than the headline suggests.

Here is the shape of it. The Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump on February 20, 2026, holding 6 to 3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President tariff authority. Duties collected under it became refundable. Then came the operational half, which is where it stops being a legal story and starts being a hiring one. KORE1 has placed controllers, trade analysts, and technical accountants through our accounting and finance staffing practice since 2005, and the calls we are getting now are not about tariff policy at all. They are about headcount. Who does this, and by when.

Two Numbers, and the Distance Between Them

The gap between what has been accepted and what has been paid is where the operational work lives. Twelve billion dollars of it.

CBP publishes its own overview of the refund mechanism on the IEEPA duty refunds page, including the detail that refunds generally issue within 60 to 90 days after a declaration is accepted. That is fast for a federal refund. Fast enough that a sloppy declaration costs you a quarter.

Phase 3 Is Narrower Than Its Headline

Read the eligibility rules before you budget for the cash. Most summaries skip them.

Phase 3 covers entries that liquidated more than 80 days ago, which is the category Phases 1 and 2 could not reach. Brandon Lord, CBP’s Executive Director of Trade Programs, described it that way. The catch is who may use it. Only importers of record who are plaintiffs in a pending IEEPA refund case at the Court of International Trade can file a Phase 3 declaration.

Not a customer of a plaintiff. Not a company that paid the same duties on the same goods. A plaintiff. Named, on a docket.

Importers who gave CBP a valid importer of record number by July 30, 2026 could begin filing on October 6. Those who submitted later are not shut out, and CBP has indicated they file on a rolling biweekly basis after that. For companies with finally liquidated entries and no case on file, the route runs through the courthouse first, inside the two-year window at 28 U.S.C. § 2636(i).

Which means the first question for a lot of finance teams is not “how do we claim this.” It is “are we even a plaintiff,” and in more cases than you would expect the answer sits with outside counsel and nobody internal has written it down.

The Refund Is a Judgment Call Before It Is Cash

This is the part that surprises operators. It is also the reason the hiring need lands in accounting rather than purely in logistics.

A refund you expect is not a refund you can book. Not yet.

There is no line of GAAP written for tariff refunds specifically, so practice has settled on two models by analogy. Grant Thornton lays out both in its analysis of the accounting implications of the ruling. Under the loss recovery model in ASC 410-30, a recovery may be recognized once receipt is probable, meaning likely to occur. Under the gain contingency model in ASC 450-30, you wait until it is received.

Same facts. Two defensible answers. Different quarters entirely.

Then it forks again. Presentation depends on whether the duty is still sitting in inventory. If the tariff cost remains capitalized, refunds reduce the asset’s cost basis. If it was already expensed, Grant Thornton notes a company may reasonably either reduce the previously affected expense line or recognize other income. ASC 855 then governs disclosure where leaving it out would mislead.

Levi Strauss shows what the choice looks like on a real income statement. In the quarter ended August 30, 2026, per its third quarter earnings release filed with the SEC, the company recorded $79 million of IEEPA tariff refunds in cost of goods sold and $5 million of interest income in other income, with a $20 million tax expense impact. Gross benefit was $0.16 per share. Then it spent some. $25 million redeployed into promotion and marketing, $19 million of that hitting gross margin and $6 million hitting SG&A, leaving about $0.11 net. Guidance pointed to roughly $60 million redeployed across fiscal 2026.

Count the decisions in that paragraph.

Somebody decided the recognition model, split principal from statutory interest, pushed the duty refund through COGS rather than other income, computed the tax effect, and wrote disclosure a reviewer would sign. That is not a customs job. That is technical accounting, and the people who do it well are the same people every controller search is competing for.

Chapter 99 Decides Which Claims Survive

The accounting only matters if the claim holds up. Holding up means reconciled at the entry line.

Start with Automated Commercial Environment reports. Inventory every entry in the window, then check whether the IEEPA duty actually landed on the right Harmonized Tariff Schedule Chapter 99 line, which is where special duty provisions get flagged. A line coded wrong in 2025 still moved the money. What it did not do was leave a record that says so cleanly, and a declaration stacked on that record carries the error forward with it.

In 2025 nobody was checking Chapter 99 coding for refund readiness. Why would they. No refund existed to be ready for.

Which leaves you reconstructing two years of filings that were assembled under deadline pressure, frequently by brokers and analysts who have since moved on. Call it what it is. Forensic work. Several searches on our desk right now are for that exact skill set, and they sit much closer to a forensic accounting engagement than to a routine compliance hire.

Three Duty Regimes Sit in One Entry File

Here is the wrinkle that makes 2025 and 2026 entries genuinely hard to sort, and it is the thing I would want a candidate to be able to explain on a first call.

IEEPA duties ended with the February 20 decision. A Section 122 balance of payments tariff followed, effective February 24, 2026, subject to a 150-day statutory limit that ran out July 24, 2026 and a 15% statutory cap. Sources disagree on its rate, and the disagreement is worth noting rather than smoothing over: Thomson Reuters describes a 10% global tariff, while Baker Donelson reports it was signed at 10% and raised to 15% the following day. If your own entry summaries straddle that week, you will need the actual rate that applied to your goods, not a secondary summary of it.

Meanwhile the tariffs that were never challenged kept running. Section 301 and Section 232 duties, along with antidumping and countervailing duties, were unaffected by the ruling. Section 232 currently sits at 50% on steel and aluminum for most countries, 25% for the United Kingdom, and 25% on copper, and it expanded by roughly 400 product codes in August 2025 alone. Section 301 activity has grown rather than shrunk.

The net effect is the opposite of what “tariffs struck down” sounds like. Duty exposure did not disappear. It got reshuffled into regimes with different legal bases, different product scopes, and different effective dates, all of which land in the same entry file. Companies that staffed trade compliance as a seasonal nuisance are discovering it is a standing function.

The Licensing Math People Skip Before Posting the Req

Now the supply side. This is where plans tend to break.

A licensed customs broker is not a credential you can push someone through in a quarter. CBP administers the exam twice a year, on the fourth Wednesday of April and October, 80 questions. Recent pass rates, taken from CBP’s own license examination notices and stated prior to appeal decisions, go like this: 22% in April 2026, 12% in October 2025, 30% in April 2025.

Twelve percent. On an open-book exam.

Read that twice.

Two consequences follow. A candidate who holds the license is scarce by construction, and the next sitting is in April, so you cannot grow one in time for this filing cycle. Anybody promising otherwise is selling a training plan, not a hire. Different product.

The adjacent roles have more depth but are not loose either. These are the May 2025 national figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, which publishes its tables at bls.gov.

Those medians undersell what a refund claim actually costs to staff, because the person you need is not the median of the occupation. You want the accountant who has written a gain contingency memo and the compliance officer who can read a Chapter 99 line, and that intersection prices well above the 75th percentile. For accountants and auditors, BLS projects about 115,300 openings a year through 2035, which tells you the base demand this work is competing against. If you want to sanity check a band before you post, our salary benchmark tool is free.

How These Teams Actually Get Staffed

A refund claim is a project with an end date. That should drive how you resource it.

The entry reconciliation is finite. It ends.

Pull the ACE data, validate the Chapter 99 coding, build the declaration, support it if CBP asks. That is contract staffing work, and treating it as a permanent hire is how companies end up with a trade analyst and nothing for them to analyze in March. We run a lot of this through accounting contract staffing for that reason, often at two or three specialists against one internal owner.

The accounting judgment is different. Recognition policy, disclosure, and the audit conversation that follows do not end when the cash arrives, and the person who owns that memo should still be there when the auditors ask about it in a year. That one is usually a direct hire. Frequently a CPA, and occasionally the tax accountant you should have hired last year, because the $20 million tax expense line in the Levi filing is not an afterthought.

One more piece that gets forgotten until the auditors show up. Whoever did the reconciliation has to have documented it well enough for an auditor to retrace, and if the engagement was contract, the documentation is the only thing left behind.

Our twelve-month retention on direct hire placements runs 92%, and that number matters more than usual here. A refund claim spans quarters. Replacing the owner midstream means somebody relearns an entry file that was difficult the first time.

Refund Questions Landing on Our Desk

Can we file in Phase 3 if we never sued?

No. Phase 3 is limited to importers of record who are plaintiffs in a pending IEEPA case at the Court of International Trade. Non-plaintiffs with finally liquidated entries generally need to file their own action, within the two-year period under 28 U.S.C. § 2636(i).

We missed the July 30 cutoff for our importer number. Is that fatal?

July 30, 2026 governed who could file on day one, nothing more. CBP has indicated later submissions file on a rolling biweekly basis after that, so what you lose is position in the queue rather than the claim itself.

Why is an accountant involved in a customs refund at all?

Because recognition is a policy choice before it is cash. ASC 410-30 permits recognition when receipt is probable, ASC 450-30 waits for receipt, and the presentation differs again depending on whether the duty is still capitalized in inventory. Somebody has to pick, document, and defend that.

$134.7 billion accepted, $122 billion certified. Where did the rest go?

It has not gone anywhere. The accepted figure covers potential and certified refunds together, while the certified figure is the portion CBP has validated and transmitted to Treasury. Claims move between those two states as they clear review.

Does a licensed customs broker on staff solve this?

Partly, and the license is genuinely hard to come by, with CBP reporting pass rates of 22%, 12%, and 30% across the last three sittings. A broker can validate the entry side. The recognition memo, the tax effect, and the disclosure still need an accountant.

Our duty exposure dropped after February. Can we cut the compliance seat?

That read is backwards. Section 301 and 232 duties survived the ruling, Section 232 expanded by about 400 product codes in August 2025, and a Section 122 tariff occupied the February to July window, so a single entry file can now span three regimes with different legal bases.

What I Would Sort Out First

Three things, in order. None require a view on trade policy.

Establish plaintiff status in writing. Not “I believe counsel filed something.” A case number, a confirmation that the importer of record number reached CBP, and a date. That single answer determines whether you are filing a declaration this month or a complaint instead.

Then find out who owns the Chapter 99 reconciliation, and resist naming the controller by default. The controller already has a close. Every month. Pulling two years of ACE data and validating duty coding line by line is a full engagement, which is why it usually goes to contract specialists while an internal owner reviews.

Last, settle the recognition model before a number reaches a board deck. Choosing ASC 410-30 or ASC 450-30 after someone has already forecast the benefit is how a refund turns into a restatement conversation.

Sixty to ninety days after acceptance is the stated turnaround, and April is the next broker exam. Both clocks are running. Neither waits for you. If you want help scoping who you actually need for this, whether that is two contract analysts for a quarter or a technical accountant who stays, talk to our accounting and finance recruiters.