To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them?

I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.

at the end of the day, it's average joe who bought his things more expensive, and he won't get back his money.

That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.

That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.

A federal law has to be approved by Congress, that isn’t happening. An executive order maybe?

I'm also ignoring a bill, from UPS, that is a few bucks of duty and a much larger $14 fee. Presumably the large fee is because UPS isn't meant to collect taxes, but they can suck it.

For what it’s worth, FedEx paid the tariff on your behalf .

You owe them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they withhold future packages to your address until you settle up.

> Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them

Strictly speaking it depends on the Incoterms agreed upon by the seller and buyer[1]. If the Incoterms are DDP, then the seller should pay import duties and taxes and as such is involved.

Of course sellers are typically trying to run a business, so they'll bake the taxes and import duties into the sales price. So effectively the buyer ends up paying for it, just indirectly.

This was relevant when the tariffs were introduced, as sellers with DDP goods in transit had committed to a sales price which included any tariffs and would have to swallow the extra costs when they got the bill from the freight forwarder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_risks...

Who pays the importer?

I guess by seller parent means the US company who sold the product to the US customer not the seller who sold it to that company.

Understandable. With the intentional chaos since last year, tariffs were changing mid-shipment without any prior notice.

> Can I get compensation from UPS or FedEx for making me pay illegal tariffs - and making me pay a fee to them for processing it too?

I can see why you are mad, but it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time).

The good news is that having directly paid UPS and not a middleman makes it much more likely that you will receive the money back. If anybody does.

That's be nice, but I place more blame on the half of Congress that was OK with this.

If everyone sued them in small claims over it, there probably would be a whole lot of default judgments.

I hope so!

Where did you hear that? It is conclusively the opposite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumers-busines...

The price of googs this last year bed to differ. Maybe for some bigger companies on certain products but what stores like Walmart did was spread the price increase across all products so it wasn’t as obvious. And that’s now where it’s going to suck the most, prices are not going to come down. Ends up being a free handout to them.

Here's evidence : https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...

"Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden."

For goods for which no domestic equivalent alternatives exist, why would the foreign suppliers lower their prices to compensate for the tariffs (which are paid by the importers to the government)? More generally, the cost of the tariffs will be split between foreign suppliers and local importers/consumers according to the competitiveness and availability of domestic suppliers, and according to market elasticity for the respective goods.

It is a mixture of the two. But my reading of various studies indicates that in this mixture, the majority was passed to consumers in the form of higher prices.

> by the other countries

That makes zero sense. You mean “by lowering the profit margin on the goods sold to the US by that specific company”.

Countries don’t pay tarrifs (bar state intervention), companies do.

But yes, it’s probably a mix of the two: raising prices and lowering profit margins.

"American consumers bore 90% of last year's nearly six-fold tariff increase, adding $1,000-$2,400 to average household budgets, despite overall inflation dropping to 2.4% in January 2026."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/02/15/consumers...

What an odd thing to say.

The businesses in the other countries are, you know, businesses. Even if it were Chinese companies that were paying the tariffs, that will be baked into the cost of the good.

This is literally first-day economics. No such thing as a free lunch. The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.

I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started. If there are suspicions that the tariffs are temporary then they might be willing to eat the cost temporarily so it’s not passed onto the consumer immediately, but that’s inherently temporary and not sustainable especially if it would make it so these companies are losing money.

Well, the analysis by the Federal Reserve said that domestic entities (consumers and companies) paid 90% of it. So, yes, saying that consumers pay it all is wrong, but it's less wrong than saying that foreign countries pay it all.

I don't recall seeing a split between domestic consumers and domestic companies, but I'm fairly sure that consumers are paying more than the 10% that foreign entities are.

It's much more true than saying that the foreign company pays it. Depends on how much slack there is in profit margins for both the exporter and importer, but the consumer does pay most of it, like 90%.