I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.
The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.
The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.
The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.
There is no intention to follow the law here.
Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.
Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.
At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.
I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).
UPS didn't even deliver the product.
I'm suing them in small claims.
We'll see what happens.
I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.
Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.
That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.
That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.
I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.
I obviously am not particularly happy about the tariffs being struck down like a lot of people are. And having paid those tariffs thinking they were at least legitimate tariffs, I'm also not super happy that I won't be seeing that money come back to me (neither in the form of services paid for by taxes, nor in the form of a refund). It's a crappy situation all around.
I won't sit here and claim the Supreme Court got it wrong, but it does make me wish the administration had worked more carefully to do it in a legal way the first time, for example, or that Congress had been involved to achieve it since the administration's party controlled them this whole time, anyway.
We’ll see…
Such a kleptocracy.
If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can.