By Tom Hals
March 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. customs agency is readying a system within 45 days to process refunds on U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs that were struck down as illegal, a customs official said in a court filing on Friday.
The declaration by Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord came just before government lawyers met with a federal trade judge to try to hammer out a broad settlement process, as Reuters reported exclusively on Friday, for returning $166 billion in tariff payments to around 330,000 importers.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the tariffs that were a central part of Trump’s economic policy. The court did not say how the collected tariffs should be refunded, leaving small importers worried the process would be expensive and time-consuming.
“This new process will require minimal submission from importers,” Lord said in his declaration, filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade as government lawyers began meeting with Judge Richard Eaton from the court.
Eaton called the meeting to discuss how the government will carry out his sweeping order issued on Wednesday directing the CBP to begin refunding tariffs to potentially hundreds of thousands of importers using the agency’s existing internal process.
On Friday, after concluding the meeting with the government lawyers, he said in a court filing he was amending that order to no longer require “immediate compliance,” and appeared to be giving CBP time to carry out the new system. Eaton said he changed his order after considering the “declaration of Brandon Lord.”
Eaton said in his Wednesday order that he had been appointed by the trade court to hear the roughly 2,000 lawsuits filed by importers including FedEx and L’Oreal seeking refunds. Trade lawyers said those lawsuits were the tip of the iceberg, and thousands more were prepared to sue if the government failed to develop a system for automatic refunds.
Affiliates of Nintendo and CVS became the latest large companies to sue for refunds on Friday.
SINGLE PAYMENT FOR IMPORTERS
Lord said in the court filing that the customs agency expected importers to file a declaration with the CBP’s computer system known as ACE detailing tariff payments, which would then be validated before refunds are processed with interest. The importers would not have to sue.
Each importer would receive a single payment from the Treasury Department, regardless of how many separate entries of goods the importer had made.
Lord did not estimate how long it would take to process the refunds, but said the CBP would not be able to comply with Eaton’s order from Wednesday. Eaton contemplated refunds would be automatically returned to importers through the existing system without documentation or input from the importer.
“Its existing administrative procedures and technology are not well-suited to a task of this scale and will require manual work that will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency’s trade enforcement mission,” Lord said in explaining why the agency could not use its existing system.
He said importers had paid an estimated $166 billion in tariffs on more than 53 million shipments. Eaton’s order would have required the agency to manually review paperwork on every shipment, a process Lord said would require more than 4 million hours of labor.
‘PRACTICAL PROPOSAL’
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest U.S. business lobbying group, applauded the CBP’s 45-day plan as “a constructive and practical proposal” to administer refunds efficiently.
“Most importantly, this proposal would spare the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who are owed refunds from having to litigate to obtain them,” the Chamber’s chief policy officer, Neil Bradley, said in a statement that also encouraged further refinements.
However, Lord’s declaration also indicated that few importers had signed up for the CBP’s electronic system for refunds. Out of more than 330,000 importers who paid the illegal duties, only 21,423 signed up for the electronic refund system that went into place on February 6, according to Lord.
Eaton is overseeing a refund lawsuit by Atmus Filtration Inc, which the judge is using as a vehicle to order CBP to issue the refunds for all importers.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Luc Cohen in New York and David Lawder in Washington; Editing by Deepa Babington and David Gregorio)
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