JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today is tariff refund day. After weeks of waiting, business owners can finally log onto a new government portal and ask for their money back. Now, this is for most of the tariffs President Trump imposed last year. The Supreme Court rejected them as unconstitutional two months ago to the day. NPR's Alina Selyukh has been talking to business owners about how this is going. How is it going? Hi there.
ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: Hello. Hello.
SUMMERS: So now what have you heard so far? How has this first day of tariff refunds gone?
SELYUKH: You know, for the most part, surprisingly uneventful, which is kind of a weird thing to say in a news magazine.
SUMMERS: Right.
SELYUKH: There was a lot of trepidation about this new portal. It's like America's hottest queue because $166 billion is at stake. So we expected tens of thousands of people logging on all at once into a system that was basically set up by U.S. customs in, like, a month.
SUMMERS: And this portal - it was up for the challenge.
SELYUKH: There were some glitches, but they seem to get sorted pretty quickly. I talked to Alfred Mai. His company is called ASM Games. It makes family card games. And every penny he has paid in tariffs has now been overturned by the Supreme Court, so he's owed just over $160,000. And I had asked him to record the audio of his experience this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ALFRED MAI: It's currently 7:17 a.m. Pacific time, and I am going to try to log into the CAPE system.
SELYUKH: His recording ended up sounding like, you know, someone filing their taxes. You know, here's a form. Here's a template. Confirm this. Confirm that. Altogether, it took him about five minutes to submit his claim. That's for 17 shipments he's had from China.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAI: Well, I guess I'll hold my breath until I actually see the money deposited into my bank account, but so far, everything seems to be pretty straightforward and simple.
SELYUKH: Folks like him who came prepared with all the documentation, who knew their way around the customs system - it took them minutes to file their claims. And now they're told it could be two to three months before they actually get the refunds.
SUMMERS: And you say that's how it went for people who knew their way around the system. So what about everybody else?
SELYUKH: Right. So first, I want to clarify, actually, that we're now just in the initial phase of tariff refunds, so not everyone qualifies quite yet. But to your question, I've talked to a few small business owners who do qualify but are nowhere near ready to even apply.
This morning on Morning Edition, we heard from a business owner who has a technical error on her account, and she spent four hours on hold with U.S. customs last week, hoping for help and could not reach anyone. I have talked to a few business owners who can't even log in. Many of them have never had to handle their customs paperwork. They've relied on brokers, for example. And now they're finding the bureaucratic legwork quite hefty and time-consuming on top of all of the other things they have to do to run a business.
SUMMERS: Right. OK, so what about people like you and me? What about shoppers? We paid these higher prices. So are we getting refunds?
SELYUKH: Yeah. This will be a tricky thing to watch because untangling to what extent shoppers carried the tariff burden is quite difficult. In some cases, we did see companies charging a direct tariff fee, so shoppers who paid that might argue for their own refunds. Now, legally, companies are not obliged to do that, but they might.
We are also already seeing class action lawsuits against some big companies, which have so far included FedEx, Costco. FedEx says it will share its refunds with customers, and Costco's CEO said the company would return the value to shoppers through lower prices.
But for most businesses, especially smaller ones, tariff costs are complicated. A lot of them absorbed the extra tax. They might have laid off staff. They might have stopped paying themselves salaries, stopped selling some of their products. Or if they did hike the prices, was it just because of tariffs or the cost of gas or insurance or electric bills? This is an interesting standoff. You know, President Trump set illegal tariffs, but now they're pitting customers versus retailers.
SUMMERS: NPR's Alina Selyukh, thank you.
SELYUKH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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