Steward Leonard Jr, President and CEO of Stew Leonard’s, discusses how tariffs are impacting grocery bills of the every-day consumer.
The number of companies suing for tariff refunds has spiked in recent weeks, a sign that many importers aren’t confident yet in the Trump administration’s plans to create a claims process after the US Supreme Court struck down the president’s trade policies.
Nearly 1,000 new cases were filed in a US trade court since March 1, according to a Bloomberg News review of publicly available records. That’s roughly a third of the more than 3,000 tariff lawsuits brought over the past year.
Customs officials have told a judge that they’re building a new system to handle repayment demands after he ordered the administration to launch the refund process. But trade lawyers say there are still unknown factors that make it prudent for clients to sue in court, including whether the government will exclude certain tariff payments from its process or challenge the scope of the judge’s authority to manage it.
“It all boils down to uncertainty,” said Michael Roll, a partner at Roll & Harris who has filed tariff refund lawsuits, including more than a dozen in the last week alone. If the administration’s claims system doesn’t work as intended or there’s disagreement about a specific company’s tax situation, “the advantage is you’re there, you’ve filed in court, now you have a seat at the table,” he said.
Spokespeople for Customs and Border Protection and for the Justice Department, which has handled the government’s litigation, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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