$133 Billion in Tariff Refunds Are Up for Grabs.
Here Is Exactly What It Takes to Collect Yours.

You must file a documented claim with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — entry by entry, under strict legal deadlines that do not extend.

The Court invalidated the tariffs. It was explicitly silent on refunds. Penn Wharton put the top-end exposure at $175 billion. The majority opinion, as Lathrop GPM noted, offered nothing on how that money comes back.

The mechanism falls back to standard customs law. And that means deadlines. Specific ones. Already running.

The Court grounded its ruling in Article I of the Constitution. Tariff authority belongs to Congress. IEEPA does not grant the President power to impose them. That reasoning invalidates the broad reciprocal tariffs — the Liberation Day tariffs of April 5, the drug-trafficking tariffs applied to Canada, Mexico, and China — applied across virtually all trading partners, as Armstrong Teasdale summarized.

The administration did not wait. Within hours of the ruling, President Trump announced a new 15% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective February 24, 2026. Section 122 has never before been used for tariffs. It caps the rate at 15% and limits duration to 150 days unless Congress extends it. Section 301 investigations were also initiated. Unlike IEEPA, these statutes carry procedural guardrails — formal investigations, agency reports, public hearings. They are slower. They are not stopped. As the WSJ reported, businesses are back in a holding pattern identical to 2025: uncertainty that makes the basics of business hard to plan around.

This is where the money is won or lost. Three paths exist, depending on where each shipment sits in the liquidation process.

There is a deeper complication the coverage is missing. Many importers passed tariff costs downstream through higher prices. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent questioned publicly whether companies that passed costs on should receive refunds at all. The government has signaled it will make this argument in court.

The importer of record collects. The retailer who absorbed inflated costs does not. The customer who paid more at the register has no legal mechanism to recover anything.

Before a company can claim a refund, it must reconstruct exactly what it paid, when it paid it, and what it imported. Across thousands of entries. Spanning months. Buried in broker emails, PDF customs forms, ERP exports, and legacy filing systems.

This is an unstructured data problem. The documentation required — CBP Form 7501 entry summaries, commercial invoices, packing lists, HTS classification data, material composition breakdowns — does not live in a clean, queryable database.

Standard AI tools are dangerous here. A generic LLM or RAG system that hallucinates an HTS code, misreads a date, or fabricates a duty amount does not simply give a wrong answer. It potentially creates a fraudulent customs filing. It can permanently bar a refund claim. It can expose a company to CBP scrutiny.

Two crises are running simultaneously. Companies must recover money from the past while managing new tariff exposure in the present. Both require getting unstructured trade data under control — fast.

Tomorrow: the specific documentation problem. What data you need. Where it hides inside your organization. Why the tools most companies are about to reach for will create more problems than they solve.

→ Come back to our Blog page tomorrow for the next post in this series