The liquidation window is the deadline nobody calendars

Every import entry carries a clock that almost nobody watches. An entry liquidates on a fixed schedule, roughly one year from the entry date, and once it liquidates the easy path to correcting it closes. There is a protest path for 180 days after, and then that closes too. The duty you overpaid does not announce itself on the way out the door.

This matters because the money is real. Products drift out of their original classifications as they change, free trade agreement eligibility goes unclaimed, exclusions get granted retroactively, and duty paid on goods later re-exported can be recovered through drawback reaching back five years. None of these correct themselves. They sit in the records until someone reconstructs the entry, proves the finding, and files before the window closes.

The reason this goes unaddressed is structural. The records that prove a recoverable entry are split: the broker holds one piece, the carrier another, the ERP a third. No single system sees the whole picture, so no single person is positioned to notice that a classification was wrong or an exclusion was missed. The work of reassembling the entry is exactly the work that does not get done under deadline pressure.

What to do this quarter

Pull your entry summaries and map the liquidation dates against today. Anything inside its window is still correctable; anything past protest is gone. For the live windows, the question is whether a line was classified correctly against current logic, whether an FTA claim was available, and whether any drawback opportunity connects an export back to an import. The reconstruction is mechanical once the records are assembled.

The discipline that makes this work is treating recovery as a deadline-driven process rather than an occasional audit. The windows are fixed and public. The only variable is whether anyone reconstructs the entry in time.

This is not legal advice. Liquidation timelines and protest rights vary by entry type and circumstance; confirm yours against your own records and counsel.

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