US tariff refund system will be ready ‘in 45 days’
U.S. Customs has set up a system within 45 days to process refunds for U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs that were lifted as illegal and importers will not have to sue for them, a customs official said in a court filing.
The statement by senior Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord came as government lawyers met with a federal trade judge to outline a process for refunding $US166 billion ($A236 billion) in tariff payments to about 330,000 importers.
The tariffs, a central part of Trump’s economic policy, were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last month.
But the Supreme Court did not say how the collected tariffs should be refunded, leaving small importers concerned that the process would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
“This new process will require minimal demands from importers,” Lord said in a statement filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade as government lawyers began meeting with U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Richard Eaton.
Eaton called the meeting to discuss how to carry out the government’s sweeping order issued Wednesday, which instructs CBP to begin remitting tariffs to potentially hundreds of thousands of importers using the agency’s existing internal process.
Lord said the customs agency’s refund process would require importers to submit a statement detailing tariff payments to CBP’s computer system, known as ACE, and the system and CBP would verify them and process refunds with interest.
Each importer would receive a single payment from the Treasury Department, regardless of how many separate goods the importer entered.
Lord did not estimate how long it would take to process the refunds, but said CBP would not be able to fulfill Eaton’s order as of Wednesday.
Eaton designed a system where refunds would be automatically returned to importers through the existing system, without any documentation or input from the importer.
“Current administrative procedures and technology are ill-suited to a task of this scale and will require manual work that will prevent staff from fully accomplishing the agency’s business enforcement mission,” Lord said in explaining why the agency cannot use its current system.
It said more than 330,000 importers paid an estimated $166 billion in tariffs on more than 53 million shipments.
Eaton’s order required the agency to manually review the paperwork in each shipment; Lord said it would take more than four million hours of labor.
Australia’s Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national news channel and has been providing accurate, reliable and fast-paced news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We inform Australia.
