For companies that spent the last year navigating the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Supreme Court’s decision to strike those levies down has raised a new question that may prove just as complicated, regarding how and when those billions of dollars in duties might actually be refunded.

Just days after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump's IEEPA tariffs, the U.S. Justice Department submitted a filing with a federal appeals court asking to delay the refund process for at least 90 days. The attempt to slow-play the refund process was quickly rejected, and was soon followed by a ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade (USCIT), which formally ordered the Trump administration to begin issuing refunds. However, the USCIT also agreed to push back the timeline after Customs and Border Protection argued that it would need 45 days to set up an automated system, leaving plenty of lingering questions around when or how refunds might actually arrive.

"I don't believe people are expecting this to be a short term process," says Rohit Tripathi, VP of industry strategy with supply chain planning software provider RELEX. 

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Getting refunds out to everyone appears to represent a heavy lift to say the least. The federal government collected an estimated $175 billion in IEEPA tariffs up to February of 2026, and for each month that refunds are delayed, the U.S. will owe another $700 million in interest, according to calculations from the Cato Institute think tank. The Supreme Court's decision was also extremely narrow in its scope, providing no insight into how refunds would even work, all while the Trump administration has made no secret of its reluctance to get the process moving.

That hasn't stopped businesses from pressing the issue. More than 2,000 refund-related cases have been filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade, and few companies, if any, appear willing to back down anytime soon.

"They're prepared to fight it out to the bitter end," says Kelly Martinez, co-founder and president of cross-border e-commerce logistics company ePost Global.

Even though the USCIT ordered the government to issue refunds, the mechanics of returning that money could take years to resolve, Martinez notes. Companies will still need to identify eligible import entries, amend customs filings, and potentially pursue claims through protests or additional lawsuits before payments are processed. And all that could drag on indefinitely, especially with the Trump administration attempting to come up with legal strategies that would let the government hold onto most or even all of IEEPA tariff money, Politico reports.

While that might be seen as a battle worth fighting for larger companies suing for refunds like FedEx, small and medium-sized businesses are at a marked disadvantage in terms of their resources to go through a lengthy legal process. For many of those smaller importers, the cost of hiring trade attorneys, reconstructing years of customs filings, and waiting through prolonged litigation could end up outweighing the value of the refunds themselves. For those that do decide to follow through, Tripathi predicts that they'll likely need to hire financial firms to handle the red tape, and in doing so, pay those firms a sizable cut of any refunds they secure.

But not everyone agrees that the process needs to be so complex, with some policy analysts arguing that the government already has systems in place to issue refunds relatively quickly, if it chooses to do so.

"Refunding illegally collected tariff money is not difficult," asserts Ed Gresser, VP and director for trade and global markets with the Progressive Policy Institute think tank. 

As Gresser points out, there's no ambiguity as to who is owed the money. The businesses that wrote tariff checks to CBP were clearly identified as the importers of record at the time, and the agency's systems already track those payments down to the individual entry level, meaning that it has a clear record of exactly which companies paid which duties. In theory, that should allow the government to match tariff payments with the corresponding import entries and issue refunds directly to those companies, along with the interest accrued since the duties were collected.

"CBP will have to sort through a lot of forms. The Treasury Department will need to send out more checks than usual this year. But it won’t be a mess unless the administration decides to create one," Gresser says.

Tony Gulotta, principal and practice leader with the Ryan tax firm, advises shippers and other businesses that paid IEEPA-based tariffs that they should make sure their information — including bank account data — is up to date in the CBP's Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) , as refunds should be remitted electronically, in a normal way. But if the entry record was already "liquidated" by CBP — that is, assessed for any extra duties paid, to be refunded — they will have to take their claims to the USCIT.

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Meanwhile, until the administration delivers a concrete plan for how those refunds will actually be distributed, companies remain caught between a court ruling that invalidated the tariffs, and a government that has yet to fully acknowledge how it intends to unwind them. That uncertainty leaves many importers weighing how aggressively to pursue refunds, while also preparing for the possibility that the process could stretch out for years. In the end, the companies that will come out on top will be the ones that "treat this like a disciplined claims project today, and a resilience upgrade for tomorrow," says Tripathi.