The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs. Over $166 billion is now potentially refundable, but the window to claim it requires action.
Throughout 2025 and into early 2026, finance teams across businesses of every size absorbed one of the most disruptive indirect tax events in modern trade history. Import duties imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) hit supply chains without warning, forced contract renegotiations, and compressed margins across virtually every sector exposed to US trade flows.
General Motors booked $3.1 billion in tariff costs in 2025. Procter & Gamble raised prices on a quarter of its product range to offset a $1 billion annual impact. Those are the numbers that made headlines. Behind them, thousands of smaller businesses including importers, distributors, manufacturers, and e-commerce operators, quietly absorbed costs they assumed were here to stay. They weren’t.
On February 20, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not grant the President authority to impose tariffs. The majority opinion was unambiguous: the power to tax (including through tariffs) belongs to Congress, not the executive branch.
The ruling invalidated the legal foundation of Trump’s signature trade policy and set in motion a refund process estimated at $166 billion across more than 330,000 importers and 53 million shipments.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) module in ACE on April 20, 2026. Businesses that paid IEEPA-classified duties can now file to recover them.
The process sounds straightforward. In practice, it isn’t.
The CBP refund process requires importers to identify qualifying entries, submit them via CAPE, verify payment records, and have those entries reliquidated. Each of those steps carries risk: missed entries mean missed refunds, documentation gaps cause claims to stall, and the 60–90 day processing timeline means errors cost time you don’t have.
For businesses with import activity distributed across multiple entities, customs brokers, or jurisdictions, the complexity compounds quickly. Duty costs may have been absorbed at different levels of the supply chain, sometimes by the importer of record, sometimes passed through supplier pricing, sometimes embedded in intercompany arrangements. Untangling that to build a complete, defensible refund claim is not a task for a spreadsheet and good intentions.
There’s also a strategic dimension most finance teams haven’t fully considered. The Supreme Court ruling applies to IEEPA tariffs specifically, but the broader US tariff environment continues to evolve. Businesses that recover their historical IEEPA costs while building flexibility into supplier contracts and indirect tax compliance frameworks will be in a materially better position than those who treat this as a one-off exercise.
VAT IT has spent over two decades building the systems and expertise to recover indirect taxes that businesses have overpaid, across complex, multi-jurisdictional environments. Tariff recovery under the CBP refund process is an extension of exactly that capability.
Our approach is built around three priorities:
1. Comprehensive entry identification. We audit your import records across all relevant entities and periods to build a complete picture of what was paid under IEEPA classifications. Most businesses significantly underestimate their recoverable amount at the outset. We don’t.
2. Documentation integrity. A claim is only as strong as its supporting evidence. We work with your customs data, CBP entries, payment records, and supplier documentation to ensure every claim we submit is complete and defensible, reducing the risk of delays, challenges, or partial refunds.
3. Forward compliance alignment. Recovery is the starting point, not the finish line. The US tariff environment is still moving. Our team helps you assess ongoing exposure and identifies where indirect tax strategy, including VAT and GST reclaim in your other markets — can further reduce your global tax burden.
The result is a recovery process that is systematic, maximised, and built to withstand scrutiny.
CBP has indicated that the refund window is open, but complexity and volume mean early movers have an advantage. Claims that arrive with clean documentation process faster. Businesses still untangling their import records in Q3 will be competing with hundreds of thousands of other filers for processing bandwidth.
The businesses we work with don’t leave indirect tax recovery to chance or internal capacity constraints. They treat it as a financial discipline, and right now, that discipline has a very specific, time-sensitive application.
The IEEPA refund is a one-time event. But it sits alongside a permanent US customs program that many businesses, particularly those headquartered outside the US, have never tapped: duty drawback.
Drawback has run continuously since 1789. It refunds up to 99% of the customs duty an importer paid on goods that are subsequently exported from the US or destroyed under CBP supervision. The five-year rolling claim window means every dutiable import made in the last five years is still in scope.
Drawback fits any business whose goods cross the US border in both directions: manufacturers who import components and export finished goods, distributors and retailers rotating international inventory, and cross-border e-commerce platforms managing international customer returns.
Think of the IEEPA refund as a one-off recovery, and drawback as the program that keeps recovering, year after year. VAT IT can scope both opportunities in a single conversation.
If your business imported goods into the US between 1 Feb 2025 – 28 Feb 2026, there is a strong likelihood you have a recoverable tariff position. The question is how much, and whether your claim will be structured to recover all of it.
VAT IT’s team can assess your position, quantify your potential refund, and manage the claims process end to end. Book a consultation with our team.
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