Businesses File Wave of Litigation to Claim Tariff Refunds

At least 1,800 companies have filed lawsuits seeking refunds on U.S. tariff payments, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Feb. 25).

Many of the suits came before last week’s Supreme Court ruling striking down many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which collected about $130 billion, the report said. Since the decision, other companies have filed similar suits before the Court of International Trade, with attorneys predicting a tsunami of litigation still to come.

“We’re talking asbestos level of lawsuits,” said Matthew Seligman, a federal litigator who is representing importers, per the report.

He was referring to the thousands of suits filed over the course of decades in relation to alleged health problems from exposure to the building material. In the case of tariffs, Seligman said, the suits are “all happening at the exact same time,” according to the report.

In their 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration did not have authority, as it had claimed, to levy tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). That authority rests with Congress.

In the wake of the ruling, Trump threatened to institute a new 15% global tariff under a different trade law, which allows the president to issue tariffs for up to 150 days in cases of “large and serious” balance-of-payment deficits.

Among the companies that have taken the government to court to recover their tariff payments are Costco, Goodyear, Revlon, Kawasaki and Bumble Bee Foods, all of which filed their cases before the Supreme Court decision came down. FedEx this week filed suit and is believed to be the first major reimbursement litigation since the ruling.

The Supreme Court ruling may have found the tariffs illegal, but it did not address what happens to the duties companies have already paid, PYMNTS reported Monday (Feb. 23).

“That omission is more than procedural, and it can leave companies navigating a gray zone in which potential tariff refunds exist in theory, yet lack a defined administrative pathway,” the report said. “In many industries, tariffs imposed over the past several years have already been passed through to customers, renegotiated into supplier contracts, or capitalized into long-term inventory strategies. The financial record is settled even if the legal one is not. Recovering duties, should a mechanism emerge, will require untangling transactions that were never designed to be reversed.”

That untangling could take some time to play out, the WSJ report said. More optimistic attorneys said the process could last a year or two, while the more pessimistic outlook is much longer.