Let’s Talk Tariffs with Jamie Rodgers: CAPE Phase 3 Gets a Date, Tariffs Stack Up & Entry Type 13 Goes Live

Your weekly coffee chat on tariffs & trade.

Well, CAPE Phase 3 finally has a date.

October 6.

We’ve been following this process for months, so it’s good to finally have something concrete to work with. I’m still not putting the date in permanent ink, but I’ll take it.

CBP told the Court of International Trade that Phase 3 will launch for qualifying plaintiff importers seeking IEEPA refunds on finally liquidated entries. That last part is important. There are going to be importers who see the October 6 date and think the refund process is finally opening up across the board.

It isn’t. At least not yet.

And that’s really what I’m interested in now.

What Caught My Eye

I’m less concerned with whether CBP can get the portal running on October 6 than I am with what happens to everyone who currently sits outside of it.

There are businesses with real money tied up in older liquidated entries. Right now, Phase 3 doesn’t necessarily give all of them a path forward.

We’ll see what happens in court.

In the meantime, I wouldn’t wait around for another announcement before getting organized. If you have IEEPA duties sitting on historical entries, you should know what you paid, which entries are liquidated, where the records are and what your potential exposure looks like.

We’ve been doing drawback and customs work at J.M. Rodgers for a long time. One thing that hasn’t changed in 75+ years is that trying to reconstruct import records after the fact is a lot less enjoyable than keeping good records in the first place.

The systems have gotten better. Human nature has remained remarkably consistent.

Here’s My Take

The Canadian metal tariffs are the story I’d spend more time on this week.

We now have certain Canadian steel and aluminum products potentially facing Section 338 duties on top of Section 232. For some goods, that can bring the combined additional duty rate to 75%.

That is a very different conversation than we were having a month ago.

At 75%, I don’t need to tell an importer that tariffs matter. They know.

What I would tell them is to make sure they know exactly why they’re paying what they’re paying.

When multiple tariff programs start overlapping, I don’t like broad estimates. I want to see the entries. I want to see the classifications. I want to know which products are subject to which duties, where they stack and whether there are legitimate opportunities to recover any of that money.

That’s where experience matters.

We’ve watched trade programs come, go, expand, contract and get reinterpreted over the years. The names and percentages change. The basic discipline doesn’t.

Know your product. Know your entry data. Know what you’re paying and why.

If It Were My Business…

The first thing I’d ask my team is pretty simple:

Show me where the dollars changed.

I wouldn’t need 40 slides on Canadian trade policy. I’d want to know what we were paying 60 days ago, what we’re paying today and which products account for the difference.

Then we can have a useful conversation.

Maybe the answer is sourcing. Maybe it’s pricing. Maybe there’s a drawback opportunity. Maybe the economics still work and we leave things alone.

But I’d rather make that decision with the actual numbers in front of me.

And I’d keep reviewing them. The rules have changed too many times recently to assume last month’s analysis is still good enough.

One for the Road

Then there’s Entry Type 13.

It goes into ACE production this week as CBP continues implementing the new process for international mail following the suspension of de minimis treatment. There are also changes to the ACE condition codes, including the addition of error code 334.

I realize I’m unlikely to convince anyone that an ACE error code is the most exciting development of the week.

That’s fine.

I’ve also been around customs long enough to know that the boring details have a funny way of becoming very interesting when your freight stops moving.

So yes, keep watching CAPE. Keep watching Canada. We certainly are.

But also make sure somebody is watching the details.

That part of trade hasn’t changed much in 75 years.

See you next week.

Jamie Rodgers
CEO, J.M. Rodgers Co.