How to get your tariff cash back

0:01Grocery Store Owner:NPR.

0:11Kimberly Adams:How do we get our money back? Business owners have wondered this for two months now, ever since the Supreme Court ruled that most of last year's tariffs set by the Trump administration were illegal. That's an estimated$166 billion due in refunds.

0:29E-commerce Business Owner:At first, the government argued it might not be able to refund the tariffs at all. Then, it seemed businesses might have to sue for their money. But then, in a matter of weeks, came a website from U.S. Customs, where importers can at least try to get their refunds. It went live this week.

0:49Kimberly Adams:This is the Indicator for Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And we have NPR business correspondent Alina Seljuk here because you're introducing us to three small business owners.

1:00E-commerce Business Owner:Who are three among the tens of thousands racing to get their tariff-free funds.

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2:15E-commerce Business Owner:So early on, as Trump administration officials argued that refunds would be very difficult to do, many business owners were really confused because tariff refunds actually happen all the time. Right.

2:29Kimberly Adams:There's already this web portal called ACE, A-C-E. And it's like a website where importers can have an account that keeps track of all their customs duties. And if there's an error, they can raise a flag for the government to take another look and maybe refund anything that the business overpaid at the border.

2:48E-commerce Business Owner:And so it made perfect sense when U.S. Customs eventually did say, OK, we'll use this existing system for mass scale tariff refunds, but we'll have a new tool inside the system specifically for claims related to Trump's tariffs that got rejected by the Supreme Court. That portal is called CAPE.

3:07Kimberly Adams:And it stands for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. Just rolls off the tongue.

3:15E-commerce Business Owner:I will quiz you on this at the end.

3:17Kimberly Adams:And so this CAPE tool, it opened for the first phase of claims on Monday. And not all imports qualify quite yet, but the majority do.

3:27E-commerce Business Owner:And there was a lot of trepidation about this tool. Like, would it hold up under the onslaught of tens of thousands of people all uploading spreadsheets all at the same time?

3:38Kimberly Adams:Yeah, people want their billions of dollars back.

3:40E-commerce Business Owner:And one of those people is Alfred Mai, and he recorded in real time his experience filing these claims.

3:47Grocery Store Owner:It is currently 7.17 a.m. Pacific time. I'm going to open up the web page now on the ACE portal and try to log in.

3:59Kimberly Adams:Alfred sounds bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

4:01E-commerce Business Owner:Right after he got his kids up and ready, but before taking them to school. So Alfred runs a small business in California. It's called ASM Games. It makes party card games like one's called Do You Really Know Your Family? Or the other one's called These Guards Will Get You Drunk.

4:22Kimberly Adams:Those sound like two games that you do not want to play at the same time.

4:25E-commerce Business Owner:Yeah, it depends on your family, I guess.

4:27Kimberly Adams:I guess so, yeah. These game packs, by the way, are made in China. So when Alfred imports them into the U.S., he has to pay tariffs. And he says every penny he spent on tariffs last year was overturned by the Supreme Court. He had 17 shipments, and he says the government owes him$162 ,000 in refunds.

4:47E-commerce Business Owner:With interest.

4:48Kimberly Adams:With interest. Very important.

4:50E-commerce Business Owner:And Alfred was pretty skeptical that he'd ever see that money. He actually kind of still is. But he did a ton of preparation. He spent a while figuring out this ACE portal. He leaned pretty heavily on AI for help getting all his paperwork in order. There was confusing guidance on what types of spreadsheets he would need.

5:09Kimberly Adams:And when he went to file his refund claim on Monday?

5:12Grocery Store Owner:I guess I'll just click on the red upload button. There we go. OK, it is done. That was fast. I guess that's it.

5:23E-commerce Business Owner:Filing his tariff claim took him a total of about five minutes.

5:26Grocery Store Owner:I guess I'm a little surprised that a government launched a system that worked on its first try. I guess I'm also surprised that the Trump administration actually complied with a court order. So I guess I'll hold my breath until I actually see the money deposited into my bank account. But so far, everything seems to be pretty straightforward and simple.

5:48E-commerce Business Owner:It really helped that Alfred had learned his way around the A system. Because if you didn't, things got complicated really fast.

5:57Kimberly Adams:In fact, many small business owners are nowhere near ready to file their claims because they'd never had to deal with their own customs forms. Lots of small companies rely on customs brokers or freight forwarding companies to take care of all the tariff paperwork.

6:12E-commerce Business Owner:For example, Rebecca Melsky. She runs a clothing brand called Princess Awesome and Boy Wonder. And it's just her and her business partner here in Washington, D.C. So it hasn't actually been clear to me until like last week what we were going to have to do and what was going to be done for us. Like she's had a customs broker so she wouldn't have to know how an ace portal works. And some brokers are doing the Trump tariff refund paperwork, but in Rebecca's case, she says her broker and her lawyer say she needs to file herself. So she's sorting all of this while, like, her kids are on spring break and she's, you know, busy running her business.

6:49Kimberly Adams:And we've heard from a few business owners like Rebecca. They're spending hours on hold with customs, trying to fix technical errors on their account, or they're struggling to even log in to ACE to begin with.

7:00Grocery Store Owner:So I put in the parts that I think, it's basically just my name and information. Then I get to the bottom, I click submit by email, and nothing happens.

7:09Kimberly Adams:Now, Rebecca's company makes clothing all around the world, in Asia and South America. She figures the government owes her company about$32 ,000.

7:18E-commerce Business Owner:$32 ,000, how meaningful is that for your business?

7:22Grocery Store Owner:It's very meaningful. We are a really small company. That's basically like somewhere around 15 percent more than what we had expected to pay in production.

7:31Kimberly Adams:To cope with some of the increased costs, Rebecca says they did a few things. They cut their own pay. They raised the price of some of their newest designs by about 5 percent.

7:40E-commerce Business Owner:They even tried asking customers for help covering these new government taxes.

7:45Grocery Store Owner:We also, we put a tip jar at checkout where we explicitly said, want to help us cover the cost of tariffs. and people were pretty generous, which was really kind.