By the Frost Law Editorial Team
It’s a historic time for IEEPA tariff refunds following a Supreme Court ruling, but importers are struggling with basic issues that complicate getting their money. To help importers navigate this unusual situation, Frost Law is providing a special four-part series focused on the ACE system — the Automated Commercial Environment — an overlooked but critical step to generate tariff refunds.
There's a file sitting at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with your company's name on it, and odds are you've never laid eyes on it.
It's called Form 5106, officially the Importer ID Input Record, and it holds your legal name, address, Employer Identification Number (EIN), and a point of contact.
When that file goes stale, the failures it causes never announce themselves as a 5106 problem. But the warnings signs are there. Your registration for the ACE Secure Data Portal (Automated Commercial Environment, or "ACE") gets rejected. Verification codes disappear. And your International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariff refund filing never gets off the ground.
Almost every importer finds out about their 5106 problem this way, not by pulling up the form itself, but by running into a wall somewhere completely different.
Hitting one of those walls right now? Call (410) 497-5947 and we'll tell you whether your 5106 is behind it.
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court decide Learning Resources v. United States, ruling that tariffs imposed under IEEPA were unlawful. That ruling made those duties refundable, and CBP built an entire process to return the money.
Refunds move through ACE via a CAPE Declaration (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries), the electronic refund filing, and get paid out by Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer, enrolled inside that same portal, under the Electronic Refunds Interim Final Rule published January 2, 2026.
A broken 5106 blocks the portal. The portal blocks the filing. The filing is the refund. Frost Law lays out that entire chain in this special guide to ACE access problems.
CBP uses the 5106 as the identity record that recognizes your company as an importer of record, which means the party legally on the hook for an import entry. Every entry you've ever filed ties back to this one document.
It also quietly controls something most importers never think about — where verification emails go.
When you register for ACE, CBP doesn't send your code to whatever address you typed into the signup form. It sends it to the email address already on file for your company, which almost always traces back to your 5106.
That one design choice is responsible for a huge share of portal lockouts. If the name on that record left the company back in 2019, the code lands in a mailbox nobody can open. This means your registration dies right there.
Here are four common problems involving 5106 the Frost team is seeing:
No 5106 exists at all. Plenty of importers assume a 5106 is on file simply because they've been importing for years. Sometimes it isn't, usually because a broker handled everything through single entry bonds and never filed the identity record in the first place. Without a 5106, the ACE system has nothing to check you against, and setup fails with no useful explanation.
The email or contact is outdated. This is the issue Frost Law sees most. The person named on the record is gone, their mailbox no longer exists, and every code CBP sends simply disappears. There's no login-screen fix. The record itself has to be corrected with CBP before the portal will send a code anywhere useful.
The legal name doesn't line up. A reincorporation, an acquisition, converting from an LLC to a corporation, operating under a DBA can be a problem. Any of these can leave your registration saying one name while CBP's file says another. ACE treats that mismatch like a stranger trying to get in, which is exactly the point of the safeguard. The problem is that when the "stranger" is actually you, someone still has to go reconcile the record.
The bad record blocks something bigger. Both dormant-account reactivations and account-ownership transfers are checked against the 5106 behind the scenes. A stale record can quietly sink either process, and the failure rarely gets labeled as a 5106 issue.
One thing a 5106 problem does not explain: if you already have a top-level ACE account and you're simply waiting on a sub-importer account to be added, your 5106 is already fine and updating it won't move that application forward. That's a separate problem with its own fix, covered in our guide to stalled sub-importer applications.
See your situation in any of these scenarios? Find out if your imports qualify for an IEEPA refund, and Frost Law will check your 5106 as part of that review.
You can't fix your own 5106 from a website login.
Updates go to CBP directly. These are typically transmitted by a licensed customs broker through CBP's systems, or handled straight with the agency and then you wait for the change to take effect.
Every detail has to match. This includes the name against your formation documents, the EIN against IRS records, the contact against someone who'll actually still be there the next time CBP sends a code. Submit an update with its own mistakes, and you've just reset the clock on the same problem.
Once the updated 5106 is filed, someone still has to confirm the change actually took before retrying whatever failed originally. Submit-and-forget is how importers burn an entire month.
Fixing a 5106 can feel like paperwork that can sit for a while. With IEEPA refunds, it can't.
Refund eligibility runs on hard deadlines. Once an entry liquidates or reliquidates, the clock starts on an 180-day window to file a protest.
For importers whose entries have finally liquidated and who may need to bring their own case at the Court of International Trade, two key dates matter:
Every week spent figuring out that your verification code went to a dead mailbox is a week gone from one of those deadlines. The importers who get paid first won't necessarily be the ones with the strongest claims, they'll be the ones whose paperwork actually worked.
Not sure what CBP has on file for your company? That's a 15-minute conversation. Fill out the contact form below and tell Frost Law what's failing, or what you're trying to set up. We'll give you a straight answer on whether your 5106 is blocking things, and what fixing it will take. You can also call us at (410) 497-5947.
By the Frost Law Editorial Team
It’s a historic time for IEEPA tariff refunds following a Supreme Court ruling, but importers are struggling with basic issues that complicate getting their money. To help importers navigate this unusual situation, Frost Law is providing a special four-part series focused on the ACE system — the Automated Commercial Environment — an overlooked but critical step to generate tariff refunds.
There's a file sitting at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with your company's name on it, and odds are you've never laid eyes on it.
It's called Form 5106, officially the Importer ID Input Record, and it holds your legal name, address, Employer Identification Number (EIN), and a point of contact.
When that file goes stale, the failures it causes never announce themselves as a 5106 problem. But the warnings signs are there. Your registration for the ACE Secure Data Portal (Automated Commercial Environment, or "ACE") gets rejected. Verification codes disappear. And your International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariff refund filing never gets off the ground.
Almost every importer finds out about their 5106 problem this way, not by pulling up the form itself, but by running into a wall somewhere completely different.
Hitting one of those walls right now? Call (410) 497-5947 and we'll tell you whether your 5106 is behind it.
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court decide Learning Resources v. United States, ruling that tariffs imposed under IEEPA were unlawful. That ruling made those duties refundable, and CBP built an entire process to return the money.
Refunds move through ACE via a CAPE Declaration (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries), the electronic refund filing, and get paid out by Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer, enrolled inside that same portal, under the Electronic Refunds Interim Final Rule published January 2, 2026.
A broken 5106 blocks the portal. The portal blocks the filing. The filing is the refund. Frost Law lays out that entire chain in this special guide to ACE access problems.
CBP uses the 5106 as the identity record that recognizes your company as an importer of record, which means the party legally on the hook for an import entry. Every entry you've ever filed ties back to this one document.
It also quietly controls something most importers never think about — where verification emails go.
When you register for ACE, CBP doesn't send your code to whatever address you typed into the signup form. It sends it to the email address already on file for your company, which almost always traces back to your 5106.
That one design choice is responsible for a huge share of portal lockouts. If the name on that record left the company back in 2019, the code lands in a mailbox nobody can open. This means your registration dies right there.
Here are four common problems involving 5106 the Frost team is seeing:
No 5106 exists at all. Plenty of importers assume a 5106 is on file simply because they've been importing for years. Sometimes it isn't, usually because a broker handled everything through single entry bonds and never filed the identity record in the first place. Without a 5106, the ACE system has nothing to check you against, and setup fails with no useful explanation.
The email or contact is outdated. This is the issue Frost Law sees most. The person named on the record is gone, their mailbox no longer exists, and every code CBP sends simply disappears. There's no login-screen fix. The record itself has to be corrected with CBP before the portal will send a code anywhere useful.
The legal name doesn't line up. A reincorporation, an acquisition, converting from an LLC to a corporation, operating under a DBA can be a problem. Any of these can leave your registration saying one name while CBP's file says another. ACE treats that mismatch like a stranger trying to get in, which is exactly the point of the safeguard. The problem is that when the "stranger" is actually you, someone still has to go reconcile the record.
The bad record blocks something bigger. Both dormant-account reactivations and account-ownership transfers are checked against the 5106 behind the scenes. A stale record can quietly sink either process, and the failure rarely gets labeled as a 5106 issue.
One thing a 5106 problem does not explain: if you already have a top-level ACE account and you're simply waiting on a sub-importer account to be added, your 5106 is already fine and updating it won't move that application forward. That's a separate problem with its own fix, covered in our guide to stalled sub-importer applications.
See your situation in any of these scenarios? Find out if your imports qualify for an IEEPA refund, and Frost Law will check your 5106 as part of that review.
You can't fix your own 5106 from a website login.
Updates go to CBP directly. These are typically transmitted by a licensed customs broker through CBP's systems, or handled straight with the agency and then you wait for the change to take effect.
Every detail has to match. This includes the name against your formation documents, the EIN against IRS records, the contact against someone who'll actually still be there the next time CBP sends a code. Submit an update with its own mistakes, and you've just reset the clock on the same problem.
Once the updated 5106 is filed, someone still has to confirm the change actually took before retrying whatever failed originally. Submit-and-forget is how importers burn an entire month.
Fixing a 5106 can feel like paperwork that can sit for a while. With IEEPA refunds, it can't.
Refund eligibility runs on hard deadlines. Once an entry liquidates or reliquidates, the clock starts on an 180-day window to file a protest.
For importers whose entries have finally liquidated and who may need to bring their own case at the Court of International Trade, two key dates matter:
Every week spent figuring out that your verification code went to a dead mailbox is a week gone from one of those deadlines. The importers who get paid first won't necessarily be the ones with the strongest claims, they'll be the ones whose paperwork actually worked.
Not sure what CBP has on file for your company? That's a 15-minute conversation. Fill out the contact form below and tell Frost Law what's failing, or what you're trying to set up. We'll give you a straight answer on whether your 5106 is blocking things, and what fixing it will take. You can also call us at (410) 497-5947.
