CAPE by the Numbers: $85 Billion Accepted, $20.6 Billion Sent to Treasury

The latest figures

According to CBP's May 26 declaration, as of May 22 importers had submitted 157,402 CAPE declarations. Of those, 108,760 passed file validation. CAPE had accepted 15,852,806 entries for processing, representing approximately $85 billion in anticipated refunds.

CBP reported that $20.6 billion had been completed, certified, and sent to Treasury for disbursement. That wording matters: money sent to Treasury is not necessarily money already received by the importer.

The rejection data matters too

CBP reported 3,481,844 entry-level validation failures and 4,185 refunds held because the importer had not supplied ACH information. Those are not abstract technical issues. An entry removed from processing is a refund that may require correction or another legal route; a missing bank account can stop payment after the substantive work is complete.

CBP also corrected an earlier data-query error: the May 11 amount previously reported as $35.46 billion should have been approximately $25.46 billion.

THE BOTTOM LINE: CAPE is working, but filing quality and payment setup remain central. Importers should review both their declaration-level response and every entry-level failure report.

We reconcile CAPE results against the importer's full entry universe so that rejected and omitted entries do not quietly disappear from the recovery analysis.