March 6 (Reuters) – The United States customs agency is preparing a system that will be ready within 45 days to process refunds related to import tariffs imposed by the country’s president, Donald Trump. The surcharges were considered illegal by the US courts and importers will not have to bear them, a US representative said this Friday.
The statement from Brandon Lord, a top U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official, came as government lawyers met with a federal trade judge to outline a process for returning $166 billion in tariff payments to some 330,000 importers.
The tariffs, which were a central part of President Donald Trump’s economic policy, were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court last month. However, the Supreme Court did not say how the tariffs charged should be reimbursed, which worried small importers as the process would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
“This new process will require minimal filing by importers,” Lord said in his statement, which was filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade just as Trump administration lawyers began meeting with Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Eaton called the meeting to discuss how the U.S. government will execute its order issued Wednesday directing CBP to begin refunding tariffs to potentially hundreds of thousands of importers using the agency’s existing internal process.
Lord said the customs agency anticipates that the refund process will require importers to submit a statement to CBP’s computer system, known as ACE, detailing tariff payments, and that the system and CBP will validate those payments and process refunds with interest.
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Each importer will receive a single payment from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, regardless of how many separate merchandise entries the importer has made.
Lord did not estimate how long it will take to process the refunds, but said CBP will not be able to comply with Eaton’s order on Wednesday. Eaton envisioned a system in which refunds would be automatically returned to importers through the existing platform, without documentation or information from the importer.
“Existing administrative procedures and technology are not suited to a task of this scale and will require manual labor that will prevent personnel from fully accomplishing the agency’s enforcement mission,” Lord said in explaining why CBP will not be able to use the existing system.
He said more than 330,000 importers paid an estimated $166 billion in tariffs on more than 53 million shipments. Eaton’s order will require the agency to manually review documentation for each order, a process that Lord says will require more than 4 million hours of work.
