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.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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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.

	▲	lotsofpulp 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is a 1099 specifically for money received from the government. https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-1099-g

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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?