# Tariff Trends 2026: Expert Insights on the Evolving U.S. Tariff Landscape [May 20, 2026]

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Flexport
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw
- **Дата:** 20.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 51:08
- **Просмотры:** 276

## Описание

Flexport Webinar
May 20, 2026

U.S. tariff policies are changing at an unprecedented pace. Do you have the insights you need to navigate customs clearance and ensure accurate imports? Watch our May 20, 2026 “Tariff Trends 2026” webinar, where our expert panel dive into the latest tariff updates and their impact on your shipments.

Speakers:
- Marcus Eeman | Director, Customs, Flexport
- Jenn Park | Director, Trade Advisory, Flexport

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Hello, good morning. Welcome to our May version of our tariff trends webinar today. Thank you so much for attending. My name is Marcus Eaman and I'm a customs director here at Flexport. If you haven't come to our webinars before, I'm just going to do a quick orientation here. On your screen you see a sidebar on the right of the main stage. That's where you can submit questions. At the end of our presentations, we always try to leave a good amount of time for Q& A to try to answer some of these audience questions. So please get your questions in early. In that same sidebar, you'll see a tab labeled docs. This is where you can download a copy of today's slide and find other helpful resources like our tariff simulator and tariff refund calculator. Above your screen, you'll see a button labeled audit your customs broker. This is one of our newest AI tools that runs a compliance audit on your historical customs entries and can help identify entries with tariff stacking issues or otherwise estimate duties that might be overpaid or might be underpaid. Click the button on your screen to get started. Okay. Now a brief legal note. Please note that all the information we talked about in this session is based on the situation at this current time and may not be customized to your specific business requirements. We will always recommend reaching out to a Flexport expert to discuss your particular situation. Today I am joined once again by my colleague Jen Park, our director and head of trade advisory here at Flexport. She will join me a little bit later in the presentation. Our agenda today is going to go over the latest news and some of the headlines with an extra focus on what happened in the 301 hearings over the last couple of weeks here. And then we're going to go into an update about section 122, a different kind of hearing, and seeing the results there. And then finally an update on C process, what we're seeing, what can still be done if you're not quite sure what to do or if you've run into trouble trying to file on your own. Jen will talk a little bit more about what to do there. After that, we'll go through our resources and end with our question and answer. So we'll start with the today's news. The news today. And the headlines are, you know, if you haven't heard, the Section 122 um, was struck down at the CIT saying that for a select group of importers, not for everybody, but at least for the a few of the petitioners that said, "Hey, the 122 duties are unlawful. " Um, they said the CIT uh, said, "You're correct and for these three specific importers, um, you're right, we're not going to you know, these are unlawfully collected. " Um, the government appealed right away and that's kind of where it is now, but General will go into more detail about um, what can what's going to be the next steps on Section 122 duties. Um, General will also give her update on the Cape refund processing as well, but the kind of headlines right now is that as of 5/12, um, we saw that there's been 15. 1 entries uh, million entries reviewed under Cape and about 8. 3 million have had the IEPA duties refunded, which, you know, or I guess like the refund has been processed, so that doesn't necessarily mean money in the bank account. That also doesn't necessarily mean that there is a net uh, the net amount was received as somebody wanted to as we've seen Customs also trying to reclaim maybe some other duties, questioning origin, reapplying Section 232 that may have been missed or misapplied. Um, so that will say that 8. 3 million of those entries have had IEPA duties refunded, um, but whether or not it's actually shown up in your bank account in the amount you expect is maybe a little bit of a different question. Outside of this though, we see that another uh, thing I'd like to highlight is that the USTR um, as part of the trade summit with China said they're looking to find 30 billion dollars of Chinese non-sensitive trade to potentially exempt. Um, this was part of goodwill in the negotiations from the Chinese summit last week uh, where President Trump flew to China, met with President Xi. Um, they talked about many issues, but including trade. Uh, and coming out of it uh, the USTR said, "Okay, we're going to try to find 30 billion of Chinese goods that maybe we could exempt from future duties. " Um, this also correlates and corresponds really well with the 301 renewal that's happening right now. So, go back to 2018, the very first section 301 investigation was starting right now, and every 301 investigation has a 4-ft or a 4-year sunset. Um, and so what they're seeing now is like, "Okay, we're going to have to review these original list one, these original list two section 301 duties on China. We may be see some additional exemptions given. " So, what does that mean? Unknown, um, but it is your opportunity to make comments if you think that your imported product is, um, not, you know, sensitive item in trade, uh, you don't import semiconductors, steel, um, you know, anything probably subject to a dumping order might be a little bit a tougher story. But, if you have other things that you import from China, um, this could be a possibility for negotiation. In return, China agreed to keep buying agricultural products and place order for, uh, American engines or and, uh, for airplanes as well as completed airplanes. Um, CPSC is moving forward still to their July 8 launch. Um, I'm really hoping this isn't the first you've heard us talk about it. I think we've been mentioning this since, I think, October

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

uh, or November last year. Uh, and you may be And if you're definitely in the loop, you've probably been hearing more of it before then, but, um, there's a new message set, and it covers a very wide variety of products. So, this is a new PGA declaration that is coming down. CPSC has been moving forward over the last couple years with, you know, first some sort of electric electronic integrations in the A system, but now they're going to say, "Okay, not only are we going to review it electronically, we're going to make you send us data every time. " Um, so, if you're not sure if your products are covered by CPSC, if you're not sure how to register your products, if you're not sure what it means to have a full message set or a reference message set, we're going to go over all of that on a webinar June 4th, but please do not wait to get started. This is something that ideally should have been done some time ago, um, but the best day would have been to start this a year ago. The second best day to start is today. Uh, please take a look into some of our CPSC resources. Um, please register for our webinar. We'll go into more of this detail here, but, um, don't wait for that webinar. Please get started. Start talking with your leadership. Start bringing resources together about how you can prepare, uh, for your products under CPSC regulation. Uh, the final thing here that I'd also kind of call out is this couple of smaller headlines. As of this morning, looks like the EU Parliament's going to pass the automotive deal. You know, Trump makes many threats on Truth Social, but one of the more recent ones was saying we're going to levy a 25% tariff on EU automobiles until they sign their side of the agreement. Um, remember a year ago we signed a deal with the EU. We set a 15% cap on a EPA rates. In exchange, we'd get, you know, greater market access for industrial products and agricultural products. Um, and then around the same time, Trump started to threaten Greenland, which, um, really didn't encourage the EU Parliament to go ahead and pass this rule. Um, then there was the Iran war, which also sent some more shocks around. Trump got impatient and is saying I'm going to put 25% on automobiles on July 4th unless you get this deal done. You hold up your side of the bargain. Uh, EU said, "Okay. " And now they've done so. There's some other reductions that I think are a little bit smaller as well that kind of go with a theme that I think I've been seeing and I've kind of been talking about is that there's a quiet, um, I don't know if I want to call it a retreat or at least a softening, uh, of the tariff stance. Um, more ways in which Trump seems to be deeply motivated by the price of gas and groceries, health care, and housing. Um, the beef quota restrictions that are in place that usually lead to higher rates on beef cuts, um, has gone down. If you've noticed, um, in the last year alone, uh, there's been an 18% increase in beef imports to the United States. Partly because US herds cattle herds have gotten smaller, but I think out of a desire to try to keep the grocery bills lower for everyday Americans, he's finding ways to maybe loosen or lower some of the rates there for certain things that show up in Americans' grocery bills. There was also a new tariff provision for section 232 that exempted more products potentially from 232 duties if they don't contain any steel, but there's no restriction on chapter like there was under the 99038203 that was exempted, okay, these four chapters you can't apply this exclusion to. This one now applies to any chapter. The only condition is that it has to be 0% of steel, aluminum, or copper, which in practice maybe only really applies heavily to cast iron or maybe ductile iron products that don't meet the tariff definition of steel. Um and then finally the 232 inclusion process. I think I mentioned it before, but if it maybe slipped under the radar here, uh previously industry could, you know, include these 232 exclusions. They could request that and say, "Okay, I want this product now be covered by a steel or 232 investigation, this HTS code in particular. " Um USTR said they're going to move that internal now. So, if they're not no longer soliciting recommendations from industry about how to get this out at the USTR making these determinations, all of which kind of lead to just a little bit lower pressure um on tariff rates across the board. I'm going to double click here into section 301 hearings. If you haven't been following these, we have two section 301 investigations and if you've heard before, this is kind of attempting to replace the IEEPA regime that existed under IEEPA. Right, IEEPA was struck down by the Supreme Court in February. This section 122 has a 150-day expiration and we're already more than halfway through it. Um so, we're coming to the end of that period and so, section 301, um which is about other unfair trade practices that unfairly burden US commerce, was taken up and the USTR looked at two specific areas. Number one, they looked at saying there was countries that are have excess overcapacity in their industrial base, meaning they're essentially creating this like situation where there's just not enough room for American producers to compete because companies are countries rather are deliberately keeping production lower or industrial capacity lower, but they have that capacity to ramp up and therefore put downward pressure on prices and thereby hurting US producers. So that's one. The second one is forced labor saying that other countries unlike the

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

US aren't enforcing restrictions against forced labor in the same way or they're tolerating it within their own countries. Again, by using forced labor they can lower the cost of labor, thereby production, thereby hurting the American worker. That's kind of the those are the two theses behind Section 301. And overall, it seemed like the USTR is kind of getting what it what they want. Um these investigations are conducted, you know, initiated by the USTR, they're reviewed by the USTR, conducted by the USTR, decided by the USTR, and then any recommendations are made by the USTR. So this is very much happening on their own home turf and you know, personally I very much expect that this Section 301 result will recreate much of what existed under IEEPA in terms of tariff rates country wide. So I think there's a soft deadline for seeing these. I think July 24th is a date that we should all expect to see Section 301 duties in place. Earlier is also very possible as well. The reason why July 24th? Well, that's because that's when Section 122 duties expire. So I would expect to see Section 301 duties active and in place before July 24th. It's probably going to be similar to the IEEPA levels. The only question now is like are they going to make any trimmings around the edges, additional carve outs, other things like that. Um there was a quite a bit of juice to sort through very juicy hearings to look at from hearings. A lot of it were really aimed at kind of contesting the premise, mostly led by countries. Ambassadors, chambers of commerce were saying that, "No, our country doesn't actually have this overcapacity that you accuse us of, or we already do have strong restrictions against forced labor, and in fact, US, you haven't really been enforcing UFLPA well enough. It's also been too meager as well. " So, there's been there was a lot of finger-pointing and saying, "You've got this all wrong. You know, you accuse you know, region fisheries of having overproduction. " And it's like, "Well, no, we only increased the value's gone up, but that's more of like an inflationary result. Our capacity actually went down over the last few years. " Germany's saying, "Well, no, like you accuse our chemical industry of excess overcapacity, but it's been lower for the last 4 years since the Russian war uh the Russian invasion of Ukraine uh which made energy prices skyrocket and made our chemical inputs really, you know, much more expensive. Um so, we haven't had that overcapacity issue. So, what are you talking about? Why would we ever face 301 duties for overcapacity? " And other people were saying like, "Even if there is overcapacity in the chemical space, why would that lead to tariffs on German toys? What's the connection between those two? Um is this even the point? " So, a lot of fun things to kind of sort through there, but I don't think it's ultimately going to be convincing um until till some later date. You can also see a little bit of a difference of opinion within the domestic industries as well, who are either benefiting from this or not. We saw the American soybean producers saying, "Please don't put any more Section 301 on China because if they retaliate, it's our soybeans that get hurt more than anyone else. " Um other domestic industries are saying, "These forced labor um you know, regimes in other countries are killing us. Like, this is going to just keep undercutting our business. We need these 301 duties to survive. " It kind of relates to this overall theme that comes out of USTR and from the president on down about this we're for consumer of last resort. So, all of this extra capacity being produced in other countries comes to the United States because we are the consumer for every other country's industrial base, rather than sort of having more natural market equilibriums. Um some country or some organizations like the um uh uh Center for American Coalition for a Prosperous America, uh they recommended maybe more targeting regimes. Maybe can we look at licenses? Can we have different products maybe? Can we have uh you know, maybe use a quota regime instead of maybe just broad-based tariffs. There's a lot of different approaches to it and I think there's not quite It's not quite clear what it is. And like I said, I think they're mostly arguing about the edges of these cases, not really the meat of it. The meat of it I think is pretty well set and I think the USTR is going to be placing duties on many countries. Um but the question is where are there going to be some carve-outs going to be. Um There's also, I think after this is that we will expect to see some court argumentation after this. Um Where it's going to be, who knows. What are the requirements of Section 301? Um and what the court will look at, who knows. Um we do know that maybe the USTR has gotten a little bit less leeway um in the post uh post-Chevron world. Um you know, where they maybe have to prove their case a little bit more strongly than they otherwise would have had to uh under the previous Section 301 investigations. Um but it won't be for a while. So, even if there is relief, even if this is struck down by the courts, it may still take at least another year um before there's any kind of refund or relief for importers paid for Section 301 after that ever happen.

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

So, that's a little bit more about Section 301 here. Um but we're going to go back to our Section 122 a little bit here. Uh and Jen will tell us a little bit about what's been happening in the court cases here uh for Section 122. How long do we have to keep paying it? All right. Thank you, Marcus. — [snorts] — All right. Before we go into the latest developments on CI uh from the CIT decision last week on Section 122. We just wanted to give you kind of a high-level overview of what has transpired so far as it relates to 122. So, as we know, on February 20th, the same day that the Supreme Court had found that the I put tariffs were unlawful, President Trump had come out announcing the Section 122 tariffs of a 10% globally. Um this was effective as of February 24th, still in place today, and this has a duration of about 150 days. So, they are set to expire, I believe, July 24th. Um and then in March, there was a suit that was filed at the Court of International Trade. Um multiple states, a few private importers, but this decision on um whether uh Trump had the authority to invoke Section 122 to really um discuss a trade deficit problem was the issue here. So, the CIT decision came out on May 7th, and what the court had said in a two-to-one split is that the president did not have authority to invoke Section 122 to um impose these 10% tariffs because the balance of payments deficit has a specific definition that was established by legislative history. And that um what President complain uh um what President was saying was a deficit within the presidential proclamation um was not necessarily meeting the statutory requirement and the definition of what is considered a balance of payments deficit in Section 122. Instead, it's actually more of a trade deficit or an actual deficit. So, in other words, it was not the same thing. So, in other words, Section 122 would be unlawful in this situation. What's different here from I put is that this decision was really specifically focused on focusing on the plaintiffs that filed the suit. There were multiple states, there were two private importers, but what CIT really looked at first is do all of these plaintiffs have standing? So, did they actually Were they actually importers of record? Did they actually pay these tariffs? And essentially, they dismissed all the states that were not really that did not pay these tariffs. They What they did was they issued a permanent injunction. Um so, to stop collecting these Section 122 tariffs against three specific plaintiffs, which were two private importers and one is which is the state of Washington because they actually did pay the tariffs. In addition to that, what they did was saying that refunds would be issued to these three specific plaintiffs. Great news. Everyone's excited, right? That these This is a possible IPR situation. But this is a very limited relief to these specific importers. And as you know, right after The day after, the government did file their appeal at the Federal Circuit. Um what we don't have outlined here is that um on May 12th, this uh Federal Circuit did approve um the department's request for a temporary stay, which is basically saying, "Hold off on the CIT's decision until the appeals decision is pretty much concluded. " So, continue to collect tariffs and for them to not refund these tariffs. Uh the plaintiffs' response was um filed yesterday saying that this pretty much is unfair. And so, we have about The government has 3 days to file a response to that. So, May 22nd. So, it's still ongoing. There's nothing immediate in terms of what's going to happen with these Section 122 tariffs. Um but we wanted to kind of provide you an update on here in terms of what has happened. And as we outlined before, July 24th is kind of like the expiration date deadline of these Section 122 tariffs. In the next slide, we wanted to provide you kind of a side-by-side comparison of how these 122 tariffs are different from IPR tariffs and kind of give you practical considerations on how you can prepare in meantime while we wait to hear more on how the 122 decision will be rolled out. So, one thing to note is that as noted earlier, the Section 122 tariffs does actually authorize the president to implement tariffs of up to 15% for a duration of 150 days to address um fundamental international payment problems. So, this could be large um and serious balance of payment deficits. So, it does authorize the president to actually implement tariffs in those situations as long as the statutory requirements are met, right? Whereas with IEEPA tariffs, there is no language word that authorizes the president to implement tariffs. What it says is that the tariff the president can regulate imports, but what the Supreme Court found is that does not extend into implementing tariffs. And why that's why the IEEPA tariffs were essentially found unlawful. So, that's the major difference there. Also, the timeline. As

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

I mentioned, there is a 150-day clock on the Section 122, whereas with IEEPA tariffs, there is no set deadline or expiration date. It can continue until there is some sort of um additional step that's taken to remove these tariffs. Also, the refund universality. So, as mentioned, this was very plaintiff-specific in the CIT decision that we got last week. Whereas with for IEEPA in the Euro Nations Florida, which is now the lead case, this is a universal refund that applies to all importers regardless of whether you had filed a civil suit. And so, when we look at the litigation path of what could happen for Section 122, it is possible that it could follow the same chain of events that we saw for IEEPA tariffs where it started the CIT, went to the Federal Circuit, and then all the way to the Supreme Court. Um we know that this took This was pretty quick in terms of getting the decision from the Supreme Court. It took about 9 months to actually get that February decision. Um so, nothing immediate, like I said, for Section 122. It is possible that it could go the same path, but there's also the fact that the Supreme Court may not want to hear this cuz as I mentioned, there is that 150-day timeline, it's only 10%, and so there are various factors that differ from the IEPA tariffs, so it is possible that it may be handled differently. However, if in the ultimate staying positive that refunds are essentially issued, it is possible that it could follow the same path as IEPA where refunds could be issued to all importers under CAAP. Um so, at least there's a mechanism in place now, whereas with IEPA where the government was scrambling to kind of get together a process CAAP to, you know, get the refund process started. Um so, as we look at this side by side, there are a few things that we wanted to kind of share in terms of practical considerations that importers can take as we just wait, right? One is audit your entries. You know, as we know for all the IEPA uh CAAP, there are a lot of mistakes that were made, whether it's, you know, your errors or whether it was a brokerage error on how the tariffs were applied due to, you know, just the broker systems not catching up to all the tariff changes that were happening. So, even for IEPA today, we have a lot of clients that are auditing their entries to fix mistakes prior to filing. So, I think right now it is a perfect opportunity just to make sure that all your entries are actually correct, that the brokers are applying, you know, the instructions that you've outlined for them correctly for the for each entry. Um also, tracking liquidations, protest deadlines similar cuz as we follow what's going to happen with the CIT decision and the CFC Supreme Court, we just want to we just don't want to lose out on the ability to potentially request refunds on these if that becomes a thing later on. Also, I think a major thing that we hear with IEPA is that you are maybe not the importer of record, but you may have had to pay tariffs because you were the end consumer. So, you know, the cost did go up. You know, you just see a lot of lawsuits happening saying, "Hey, we actually had to pay higher prices on our goods to, you know, take into effect all the tariffs that were implement that were um added to the goods, right? And so, you see a lot of things happening. So, if you are working with a supplier that is acting as the importer of record, and you're not necessarily paying the tariffs, are you having conversations to make sure that, you know, they will, in fact, request refunds later on? Or if not, you know, you're taking that into consideration, and it's not a surprise. So, that those conversations are happening around AEPA. It could happen around Section 122. So, you might as well kind of get that started, so you're proactively having those conversations and planning for that. Um and I would say, in general, companies should be aware, as Marcus outlined earlier, there is a lot of tariffs that are still in discussion, right? And I think the administration has made it clear that 122 may be a temporary thing as they establish more tariffs through 301s, 232s. There's investigations happening. So, we don't think tariffs are going to go away anytime soon. It's just going to take a different form. And so, you just want to plan for that, as well. All right. So, we can jump into the most exciting, probably, section of today's webinar, which is CAVE. And for this, we wanted to kind of start with the stats of what we're seeing, but also provide insight and helpful tips as what we're seeing as we're also processing CAVE for our clients and helping them through the process. So, we know that May 11th is when we got our latest update from Brandon Lord from CBP on how CAVE is progressing. I think, overall, I myself am surprised how well the CAVE process is moving, but also how quickly it's moving, right? They did say that general timeline of receiving refunds is 60 to 90 days, and we all had anticipated that it's going to take at least 2 months for us to see any money in deposited into a client's account. That is not the case. What we're seeing today is that, from May 11th, they did say that there was 68% acceptance rate on CAVE declarations. Great news. There's more to come. But, overall, what they announced his um in the past is

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

that there were 330,000 importers, right? That they had that paid about um $666 billion in IEPA duties across 53 million entries. That is kind of like the overall scope of IEPA, right? And so, today, what we see is that there are about 15 million out of those 53 million that were already filed. So, 28 and 1/2% have been filed on these entries. And there may be various reasons why this has not is not higher than uh what it could be, which is there are companies that are auditing. choosing to wait. I know clients that are saying, "Hey, we don't need to be the first. We just want to see how the process plays out, what issues that they're seeing so that when we do file, we know exactly what needs to happen. " So, they may be intentionally delaying, or they may be delaying for other reasons, audit, whatnot. Also, um for the amount of entries that have liquidated or re-liquidated for refunds, it is a significant amount. I'm surprised that there is like 8 million that have actually liquidated and re-liquidated for refunds out of that 15. It seems to be moving pretty quickly, like I mentioned that what we had anticipated. But, what's interesting to note is that when they said how many um what custom when customs updated how many was actually refunded, they only said a portion. They didn't give a specific amount. And so, that is kind of like the outlier of when can we receive the money, how much are we going to receive? And I think a lot of the concerns and questions that we received from clients is, "Hey, we expected X amount in IEPA refunds. We only had we only received 10% of that, 20% of that. Is that normal? Are we going to be seeing refunds trickling in each day, each week? Like, what does that cycle look like? " And honestly, for us, we will we are monitoring to see how often that refunds are being issued. Um, we do know that it's more than once a week. Um, we thought it would be more a Friday liquidation, Monday refund schedule, but it seems like it's Friday liquidation with multiple refund dates assigned. But, it is common or it is correct to say you should have you probably only received a portion of your refunds. Why is that? When we looked at the data of all the refunds that were issued to clients, we noticed that it was a liquidated entry that had re-liquidated for a refund. So, what that means is that when you filed your case, all the entries in your data set that were already liquidated, so when between the 100 between the 1 to 80th day liquidation timeline, those are the entries that CBP seems to be targeting first. So, all the reports that we've seen, it was all re-liquidations with those refunds that were kind of nearing the liquidation date already. So, it or the 90th day already. So, I think you we the trend is that those were kind of like the first to be handled with more to come. And so, don't be worried if you only got a portion, that does not mean that everything else got rejected. It's more of like it's coming. It's they're doing it in batches. And what's also helpful is that they did note that they're about 1,800 consolidated refunds that have not been transmitted due to ACH issues. I think Customs has made it very clear that in order for importers to receive refunds, your ACH has to be set up. So, we encourage you to just double-check that your ACH account has been set up. You just don't want this to be an issue why you're not receiving refunds. There is a report that you can pull. I believe it's like a rev 63613. It's like a ACH rejection report, and that will actually show you if your deposit your refunds have been rejected for this various reason which this particular reason which is that your ACH was not set up. And we know from just what we're hearing and what we've seen from CBP responses that it's going to take another 4 to 6 weeks for them to reissue the refund. So, you don't want to be in a boat where you're having to wait longer just cuz your ACH wasn't set up cuz now it looks like there's an actual timeline of 4 to 6 week that Customs is saying that you'll have to wait. Um another thing that we wanted to point out is that there is no announcement of phase two. I know on the 511 we're all waiting to see when phase two is going to be announced, especially for entries that are under recon, um subject to drawback, or protest. There's a lot of entries. We have a lot of clients that are still waiting for phase two. And I think particularly what's going to happen with all the liquidated entries past that 80th day timeline, especially when protest deadlines are approaching. There is no decision yet on how this will be refunds will be issued, what to do with those. We're still recommending if your entries are nearing that protest deadline, file this protest. You just don't know until we hear more on when phase two will be implemented and whether there's protest the liquidated entries beyond the 80th day will be included. Um May 26th, I believe, is the next CAP update. It is possible we'll get some sort of update on phase two then. Hopeful, but no news yet, so that's why we're saying monitor your liquidation protest deadlines. Make sure you get your CAP filed, but um yeah. And

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

I also want to say for your CAP, we have a lot of questions in terms of we're running into a lot of errors, what should we do? Um I would say speak with your broker or whoever you're working with because there's different ways you can handle your errors. One is you just have to wait because it's not eligible for phase one, or because payment has to be or um it's part of a protest. But there's another subset where you just have to wait a little bit because you just have to pay payment and resubmit right after that. There is other issues where you actually have to go and correct the entry, so file a PSC and then refile CAP. Or there is an or the third bucket is it's just not eligible, right? Um there is no tariffs on your entry, or there may be an issue on it. So, um depending on the error that you get, there's various ways that you will need to fix it. Um it's not just let's just keep res- resubmitting. It's not going to work. So, um our team's happy to help to kind of answer those questions if needed, but just wanted to say these are kind of like what we're seeing here, but happy to hear that everyone is not everyone, but a lot of you are starting to see refunds actually hit your bank accounts within 21 days of Cape release, right? Which is a lot shorter than what we anticipated. So, the process is working. It's exciting. And more to come on that. All right. And before we go into Q& A, um I wanted to share how um Flexport can support. So, we do as Marcus mentioned at the earlier of the presentation that we do have a free AI tool that runs a compliance audit to catch any mistakes, misclassifications, or potentially identify duty savings opportunities. So, if you are interested, please click on audit your broker customs broker tab at the top of your screen. Um also, we encourage you to use our tariff refund calculator, our tariff simulator, and if you have any questions regarding classification duty rates, please reach out to our classification team at classification@flexport. com. If you have any If you want to reach out for any questions related to trade advisory, drawback, or any customs inquiries, you can contact customsbd@flexport. com. All right. With that, I would like to invite Marcus back on stage. All right. All right, Jen. Um I'm going to take the first question here cuz I I'm looking through this list and I'm seeing a lot of questions with Cape capitalized. Um Let I will let you rest your voice for a minute here. I see the first one that came in. Um What There are three Section 301 open right now in Vietnam. What is the expectation of the final tariff rate that will end up for countries like Vietnam? In the end, will Vietnam become more expensive than China? And how are we supposed to plan a sourcing strategy if tariff rates are so uncertain? Um yeah, I think as a guidepost, you're correct. There are some existing 301s open on Vietnam as well. as well. Um but those have been moving much more slowly and they may end up with no tariff recommendations at all um whenever that does come to pass. Um I think the other part for a 301, you know, with the rates, so like I'm expecting if you just kind of want to benchmark of what will my rates be under a 301 scenario, I would look at what was the IEPR rate 6 months ago and probably say like that's probably a pretty good starting point. So for Vietnam, that was 20%. It was a 20% IEPR rate um 40% if it was like a Chinese transshipment um which are not I we saw very limited enforcement in our experience in brokerage, but um that also may be something. So I would still probably expect about 20% from Vietnam under a Section 301 uh regime. They also did have like a trade deal in place and that trade deal did say the US would place a 20% tariff on it on Vietnam uh origin goods. So I would still expect 20% um to your broader a little bit more exacerbated question of how are we supposed to plan a sourcing strategy um under this kind of tariff regime? Well, I think I talked about this a little bit last year, I remember, and it was a question very similar and I think it's not a question of where's safe to build. It's like safer and less safe is kind of the question about vulnerability to tariffs. I think the administration will say, "Well, let's bring it back to the United States. " Um which for many reasons may not be practical uh to do for your particular business. Um the United States is not going to have it, but I'd also say in that list of maybe safer countries um seems like EU is maybe part of this list. Um seems like Canada, Mexico under USMCA is still seeing um quite a bit of tariff preference for those countries as well. Um any country with a trade deal can maybe already established is probably also in a good spot. So, Vietnam has a trade deal um in place. India is trying to work on a much larger compact. It's actually kind of doing fits and starts and I think a big blocker is kind of market access and dairy exports in the US. Um but if they ever solve that, India is probably maybe thought of as like a balance to China perhaps is like maybe as a counter to China we're going to get closer to India. Um but it's a

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

bit of a guesswork and so I'd probably say, you know, safer countries are those that are closer to the United States both geographically and politically. But that's still no guarantee of safety. Yeah. All right, Jim. Um we got a few here on Cape refunds actually and by a few I mean well over a page. Um Uh let's uh let's go through at least maybe a few of them here. One said, "We received a partial refund from Customs for tariff. Yet the ACE portal claim status does not show any refunds or any detail at all. Any idea why that is other than the government? " — Yeah, that's interesting that you received a refund yet it does not show up in your report. I wonder if it's if you're looking at the ES003 or which report you're looking at because there is specific CAP reports that you should be pulling to identify the refunds. There's a few I believe like 603, there's a ES022 which is kind of like the CAP entry report that has that should be the main one you look at to see how much was refunded per entry duty and interest but is split out. So, you may want to go back in to see if you can pull a CAP report to see if that matches what you received in refunds. It is also possible that your refund might be tied to something else. Maybe you filed a PSC or you know, um some other format of why you're receiving the refunds cuz I know we have clients saying, "Hey, we received a refund. Is this related to IPA? " And sometimes it's not. It's cuz they filed a PSC and they were anticipating a refund from Customs. So, it that may be another scenario, but I would say probably look at one of the CAPE reports, and that should give you more guidance as to what the re- if the refunds will match. And as I kind of talked to that, one important thing is that um when you file CAPE, one thing that's interesting, I'm not sure if you noticed, is that if you file CAPE and they go into ACE and you look at your ACE report, um there is no section two of section um IPA tariffs on your ACE report anymore. It's completely blank. So, like once your CAPE is filed, accepted, and you look at your ACE um report, you will see that there is no IPA tariffs on your report. And what the issue there is, we have clients now coming to us saying, "How can we reconcile this? Like, we thought we could pull the report later and then see that the refund matches what was paid, but now we can't kind of compare the two because now our ACE report doesn't show that value. " And so, what we're what we've done with our clients is we actually pull the static report of ACE prior to filing CAPE so that we can track those and reconcile those refunds to make sure what was received on that particular entry is exactly what was paid plus interest. So, if you have not filed CAPE yet, one thing I would advise is pull of ACE report static sheet, have it on file, or save it to your system so that you can use that as a point of reconciliation to confirm that you've, you know, received everything you should have. But, um That's good advice. And you mentioned it there just in passing, but I saw another question about saying, "What are those ACE reports? What are the names of those reports that people should be pulling? " Yeah, the there was one is ES022. That is the CAPE entry summary report, and that will show you like your CAPE declaration, your refund status, your refund check number, um but also like the refund amounts, like the dollar amounts. There was other re- refund reports that you can pull associated with CAPE, but they don't go down to the level of like the duties and interest that are actually refunded. It will show more of a status update saying like, "Hey, was sent to Treasury. " Um or there's um a liquidation date or reliquidation date happening, and those are more of like a rev 603 report. Um I think 615 is another report. We can provide you more details um about it. I know there's a CSMS, but also CBP Cape's um guidance document FAQ has all of this. But there's two or three different reports. I know they don't make it easy. Uh two or three different reports that you should receive. But also, there is a status refund status. That changes, and that will be indicator of whether you will you are actually issued the refund. So, when Customs approves your Cape, so reliquidates, liquidates it, approved for um the refund, they will send it to the Treasury, right? So, that So, there's a status that gets updated immediately that says sent to Treasury. Once the Treasury actually issues a refund, then there's a status that changes to Treasury issued. So, like once you see that, then you know that the refund is coming or has been deposited into your account. Until then, it's probably pending a refund, but you know that it's actually been approved by Customs at this point. Yeah. Okay. Um okay. I see it kind of a few questions here about Cape errors um overall. So, uh I think maybe it's kind of going through a few of them here. There is an error that says cannot calculate duty. There's another one that says relationship mismatch. Um you have or another one is saying unable to calculate. Have you seen some of these errors, and can you give a little

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

insight of what they mean? Yeah, I would say HTS relationship sequence mismatch for goods on um goods value amount must be put in chapter 1 through 97. That's probably one of the top errors that we see. And also, unable to calculate duty is another one. What's interesting enough, when we filed Cape early on 420 for some of our clients and we got that unable to calculate duty, it was really unknown what that error was. Like we were looking at each entry under trying to understand what the error was so that we could refile the claim. And I know in that particular week Customs had a few webinars and it was raised over and over again by the community saying this does not make any sense. Can you provide more clarity? And they actually did. They actually fixed their back-end system, but also they provided more of an they updated their FAQ to provide more guidance as to what it could be. Interesting enough, for the ones that came out with unable to calculate duty when we first submitted in on the first day of Cape, we really we resubmitted without changing anything the second week. Because they said they're just fixing they're looking into it. It was accepted. So no change was made and no corrections were made on the entry. We were literally resubmitted the entries on a separate Cape claim. Those were all accepted, which was pretty interesting. So our assumption is that Customs went in and fixed the back-end system, whatever it was their logic in terms of some of these errors. So it that may fix the issue, but for the relationship sequence mismatch that there's a goods value that needs to be reported on chapters 1 through 97, that's true. That's probably because there is no value that was associated with your class your underlying classification. So it might just be blank or it's not there. So you may want to file a PSC to actually declare the value on that good and then file Cape. Yeah. Mhm. Okay. Okay. Um let's see. Uh are you seeing refunds being paid in tranches? I part partial payments as the process or as the progress through the review. So like are they kind of you know, you submit couple hundred entries at a time or something? Are we seeing like entries kind of come out in little pieces or is it kind of the entire claim gets approved and refunded all in one go. What How do those refunds come out? Yeah, so we haven't seen any importer receive 100% of their refunds yet. It's all partial and like I mentioned, it seems to be entries where it was already liquidated and they were being re-liquidated with the refund. So, I think Customs is starting those first. So, if you had a claim of let's say 200 entries, it is possible only about 15 were refunded. Um we are not sure how quickly the rest of the refunds are going to flow in and what particular cadence. We're still observing that ourselves. But we know that based on the CBP report, they said 8 million of those entries have been liquidated re-liquidated for refund of 3. 5 billion. But only portion has refunded. So, I assume that those at least that 3. 5 billion is going to be refunded and slowly like within I think I don't know if it's day time frames each week, what it is, but I would say monitor your refunds cuz we do see that some clients that did receive a refund maybe on a Monday received another refund on Thursday of that same week or that you know, they receive refunds each week like the first last week and then they see one something this week. So, it's coming in it's coming in batches. We don't know how they batched it, but it shouldn't be that you'll see a refund 100% on your Cape claim come through yet. Mhm. Okay. All right, and um I'm going to give you one more Cape question here combining a couple and then I'll give you a break. Um you see one said we have some entries that liquidated more than 180 days ago and they have some I tariff amounts on them. Should I consider filing suit at the CIT to get these tariffs repaid or should I wait and hope that a future phase will cover these? And then similar here, you know, for entries that are in Cape phase two, should we file protests as the 180 day window is closing or will Cape refund those uh as well? So, kind of a question of like how if we have these kind of older entries, you know, coming up or past the 180-day mark, do I do court cases? Should I try to rush some protests? What's our advice? So, I would first look at So, this splitting up the question. For the entries that are nearing the 180th day protest deadline, so they are still within, you know, they're liquidated, but no, they have not expired yet in terms of a filing a protest. Uh we would highly recommend filing a protest to preserve your rights there. We don't know if phase two will be um launched, you know, soon or it's going to take some time. There's also the fact that the government may appeal, right? They have until June 7th to appeal this decision. And there are of talks saying that if they do appeal, it is possible that the case process may be on hold, right? And so, we don't know how long this process will take. So, until we find out more, I would say in order to preserve your rights to these refunds, file this protest. For those that have filed past the 180-day time frame

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

unfortunately, it's past the protest deadline. Should a CIT file um suit be filed, the statutory the statute of limitations on a CIT case for that is 2 years. So, you still have some time. You still have until 2027 to file suit. So, it doesn't have to be immediate. So, for those, I would say it is possible for you to just wait to see if something comes out in the next month or two before deciding to file suit or even, you know, mid-year or, you know, I can't believe it's already almost mid-year, but maybe at the end of this year. But my um recommendation is just maybe hold off because it is possible it could be included in a later phase, and there is no immediate need to file a civil suit because the statute of limitations is 2 years. So, you still have some time to make a decision. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I have a few here that I wanted to talk about Section 301. So, I'm going to uh hop on those here. Um first one, will the new 301 tariffs be on stacked on top of Section 232 uh steel uh related if products already have 25% Chinese Section 301, will the new tariffs override? Are the new tariffs going to be added together or some combination number applied? Um, and uh, you know, how will Section uh, you know, will products under, you know, an Annex 2 exemption from Section 122 still be exempt from 301 when that goes into effect? I think for uh, for like the 301 in terms of China, I think they probably will not stack. And I think that is something that was indicated by some of the people that asked. They said the I think the National Foreign Trade Council was one of them who said, "You know, we're not going to we request that you allow some exemption so that there is no stacking of 232 and 301. " Um, we prefer that. Um, that would just kind of lower the tariff boundary, which would also recreate what did exist under IEEPA. So, I if this is meant to replace IEEPA, it stands to reason that these would also therefore not stack on top of Section 232. Um, it also is reasonable to assume that there will probably be some Annex 2 exemptions. The idea behind Annex 2, these were naturally unavailable resources or maybe sensitive products that we needed to have imported. So, like petroleum products, um, bananas, coffee, spices, things that we just really don't produce here. They were caught up in IEEPA originally. Then in November there was a big addition to this Annex 2 list, and so they were exempted from IEEPA. I think that's likely to continue. I think kind of for my overall like kind of thesis here is that the Trump administration is like very aggressive on trade, but behind the scenes they're giving smaller exemptions in maybe sensitive areas that show up in the everyday wallets of Americans, right? You know, gas, groceries, healthcare, housing. They're finding ways to maybe lessen some of that impact, um, even if they want to keep, you know, outwardly their commitments here. So, I would expect that there will still be some reductions here, and I'm not sure that Section 301, anything else on China will continue to keep stacking. I do think this may maybe there will be something here, but it may be more modest. Um maybe smaller percentages or it'll be 0% for the next 3 months pending China's buying of soybeans and you know, during the Q3 Q4 harvest season. Like are they actually keeping their commitments or not? And so for now we're not going to do anything from China, but if they don't keep their commitments, we'll put it in place right away. I could see some sort of something like that playing out with China specifically. Um one other one here I see how do we submit a 301 review for those non-sensitive trade items I talked about? Yeah, that came from an interview on Bloomberg from the USTR career. So there is no actual process yet in the Federal Register nothing on the USTR site about how to apply to be you know, one of these things like saying like hey, we're not sensitive, but um I do think there probably will be some process here. Um but uh it uh that is not yet been released. There's no public information there. Yeah. Um Jen, I think I'm going to give you kind of one last batch of questions here about Section 122 since that was one of the main topics of the webinar. Um Section 122 after the tariffs expire on July 24th, can they be renewed? So for Section 122, they can be extended by Congress. Uh I don't know if that will actually happen, but they can extend it. — Especially in an election year. Yeah. Yeah. Um but also it is possible for Trump to try to implement new Section 122 tariffs, right? There's nothing that's probably going to stop him. So uh yeah, so they can technically be renewed by the president, but it could be extended by Congress. Yeah. Okay. Um any are importers required to file lawsuits with the CIT against Section 122 to be reimbursed? That's a good question because the decision from the CIT was very plaintiff specific. You would it would kind of align with the fact that maybe plaintiffs will need to file civil suit in order to receive their refunds. However, I don't think I think it's still premature to say everyone should

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxST18lVBw&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 51:00)

start filing civil suits. It is possible that there may be universal refunds later on. I'm not saying it there will be, but it is possible that section 122 will be treated differently that civil suits may need to be filed by individuals as opposed to the IEPA, but um right now it's uncertain at this time. All right. And one more I think is a big question here. You know, a very max post reading. CIT on section 122, the state of Washington. Does that mean all importing companies in Washington? That would be great, but yeah, unfortunately no. It's yeah, the state of Washington they were the importer of record. They it's specifically with their imports unfortunately not all goods being imported into the state, yeah. All right. Well, I think with that kind of covers I think most of the topics here. And that will conclude today's webinar. We'll email everybody a link to the recording tomorrow. Thank you again and have a great day. Take care.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52626*