| ▲ | sc68cal 8 hours ago |
| The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer. So the importers are the one that had the tax collected from them and would be getting the refund. The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain. |
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| ▲ | sowbug 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mattas 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code. The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this. | | |
| ▲ | Animats 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | A regular importer who routinely pays customs duties is now owed money by Customs and Border Protection. Can they now set off future duties against the balance owed them? Normally, reciprocal debt cancellation is legal. The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction. [1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/TOP/ | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Smart money is that they will make some token comment about "leave it up to the states" or lower courts and then do absolutely nothing about it | | |
| ▲ | aardvarkr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The feds are the ones that control import duties, not the states. The courts will decide two years from now what to do. |
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| ▲ | jopsen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2. There is no intention to follow the law here. |
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| ▲ | tim333 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the tax is basically on the profit made when you add up costs and expenses. Say: Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero. Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2. At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws. | | |
| ▲ | sowbug an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I think that's the starting point. Another part of my question was whether a CPA applying GAAP would recommend recognizing the $2 as other income, or else as a liability against a future claim from the customer who bought the widget and is now seeking a partial refund. I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable). | | |
| ▲ | tim333 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I imagine the government will provide some sort of guidance for that kind of stuff? |
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| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada. UPS didn't even deliver the product. I'm suing them in small claims. We'll see what happens. I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense. Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them. | | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | aardvarkr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Huh? In what world was the tariff on sand 2000%? | | |
| ▲ | jacobgkau 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It wasn't the tariff. UPS has been tacking on a ridiculously high paperwork fee for the service of processing tariff payments. Other shipping companies have also had fees, but UPS is the main one that's made it exorbitant and disproportionately higher than the tariff itself. |
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| ▲ | sc68cal 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's a great question. I would also love to know that answer. I agree with you that they're not going to share the refund if the importer was the middleman in the supply chain, and same thing if the importer was also the seller. | | | |
| ▲ | nullhole 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds? |
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| ▲ | aucisson_masque 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | blurbleblurble 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Many are beyond furious | | |
| ▲ | ikiris 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Many voted for this | | |
| ▲ | cptroot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top. | |
| ▲ | aucisson_masque 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | These people are not necessary against tariff, they are against paying more for their stuff and having it benefit some middleman because the current government messed up badly. I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job. | | |
| ▲ | jacobgkau an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I honestly have not been one of those "it's just a negotiating tactic" people and have instead been saying this whole time that I understand why tariffs (and the end of de minimis) are needed at the moment. Seeing Temu ads all over TV and the internet flouting word-for-word that I can "shop like a millionaire" to buy their cheap, disposable, polluting, unethically-produced junk, while I'm not making enough to actually live comfortably (with many worse off than me), comes across as a real and obvious problem to me that needs to be nipped in the bud despite whatever short-term dollars I might save by buying Temu knock-offs on a regular basis. (And I do import personal purchases from overseas a few times a year, and have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to paying tariffs on those.) I obviously am not particularly happy about the tariffs being struck down like a lot of people are. And having paid those tariffs thinking they were at least legitimate tariffs, I'm also not super happy that I won't be seeing that money come back to me (neither in the form of services paid for by taxes, nor in the form of a refund). It's a crappy situation all around. I won't sit here and claim the Supreme Court got it wrong, but it does make me wish the administration had worked more carefully to do it in a legal way the first time, for example, or that Congress had been involved to achieve it since the administration's party controlled them this whole time, anyway. | | |
| ▲ | Recurecur an hour ago | parent [-] | | Don’t panic too much yet, there are other legal bases for the tariffs. We’ll see… |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So they basically figured out how to bribe all these companies? Such a kleptocracy. | |
| ▲ | PowerElectronix 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i read that Costco could actually refund everyone, as they can know exactly who bought what. If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can. |
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