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Mixed claims — what to do when CAPE and IEEPA both apply
If you've read about the tariff refund opportunity, you've likely seen the recovery world divided into two buckets: CAPE for simpler claims, and full IEEPA litigation for complex ones. The framing is useful as a starting point. It's also incomplete.
The reality for most mid-sized importers is that a single business almost never has a pure CAPE situation or a pure IEEPA litigation situation. Most situations are mixed. Some entries fit the streamlined administrative path. Others involve enough complexity to need legal representation. And many situations have a third dimension on top — the question of whether to factor part of the receivable to access liquidity now rather than waiting months or years for the government to pay.
Understanding how to handle a mixed claim is the difference between recovering what you're entitled to and leaving meaningful dollars on the table.
Why mixed is the norm
A typical mid-sized importer's refund profile spans entries from multiple countries, over a fifteen-to-eighteen-month period, with shipments classified under various HTSUS codes. The IEEPA tariff rates that applied varied by country and by date. Some of those entries are textbook CAPE-eligible — a single supplier, one country, clean classification, unambiguous duties paid.
Other entries from the same business are more complicated. A shipment from a country that faced layered tariffs — IEEPA plus Section 232, or IEEPA plus Section 301 — requires careful analysis to determine which portions are refundable. A shipment with a contested classification opens a separate question. An entry that was extended or suspended in liquidation introduces a procedural wrinkle that doesn't fit streamlined administrative processing.
The same importer can have all of these in their entry history. That's a mixed claim.
How a mixed claim actually gets worked
When a refund situation spans multiple recovery pathways, the right approach is not to pick one and force everything through it. The right approach is to split the work across the professionals who fit each portion of the claim — and coordinate the timing so the pieces don't interfere with each other.
A typical sequence looks something like this.
First, the cleanest entries — the CAPE-eligible ones — get filed administratively. This is work a customs broker or accountant with refund experience can do efficiently. The filings are streamlined, the processing time is measured in weeks to months, and the recoverable dollars from this portion of the claim arrive first.
Second, the more complex entries — the ones with classification questions, multi-tariff layering, or other complications — get worked by recovery counsel. This is legal work, and the timeline is longer. But the recoverable amounts in this portion of a claim are often larger per entry than the CAPE-eligible portion, because they involve the entries with the most significant duties paid.
Third, if your business needs liquidity during the recovery window, factoring becomes a consideration. A factoring partner can underwrite the projected refund receivable and advance you a portion of the expected recovery now, in exchange for a discount on the eventual payout. This is particularly relevant for the litigation portion of a mixed claim, where the timeline can run a year or more.
The point is that each portion of a mixed claim gets the treatment that fits it — fast administrative work where that fits, full legal representation where that's needed, and liquidity options where they make sense.
Where coordination matters
The risk in a mixed claim is not that any single portion gets handled badly. It's that the portions don't talk to each other.
If your customs broker files CAPE claims for the simple entries without coordinating with your recovery attorney on the complex ones, the administrative filings can sometimes inadvertently waive arguments the attorney needs to preserve. If your attorney builds a litigation strategy that assumes certain CAPE claims have been filed, but they haven't, the strategy may not hold. If you arrange factoring against the projected recovery without your professional team's input on the realistic recovery range, you can either over-leverage or leave value on the table.
This is the friction that mixed claims usually run into in the current market — the importer is the only party who sees the whole picture, but the importer is not in the best position to coordinate professional firms who don't have existing working relationships with each other.
What Corvant does
Corvant exists to handle this coordination. Our AI-assisted qualification analyzes your refund situation across pathways — which portions are CAPE-eligible, which need counsel, where factoring fits, and how the pieces interact. Then we connect you with the professionals matched to each portion of the claim, and we surface the coordination explicitly so the firms can work together rather than around each other.
Mixed claims need mixed teams. The first step is understanding what your refund profile actually looks like across all the pathways at once.