Companies have acquired tariff refunds. What about customers? Some firms are offering refunds while others decline.

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

The Trump administration is paying U.S. companies billions of {dollars} – reimbursements for some of the tariffs they paid that the Supreme Court dominated in February were unlawful. But will any of that cash make its method back to buyers? NPR’s Stephan Bisaha talked to one buyer who’s still ready.

STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: When we’re speaking tariff refunds, we’re speaking more than $160 billion. And Sarah Alonzo (ph) needs her reduce.

SARAH ALONZO: I’m like, nicely, give me my cash (laughter). I was like, open the door, reduce the test and give me my cash.

BISAHA: Money that she paid for a wheelchair she makes use of to get around Tampa, Florida, after her previous one lastly fell aside. The new one is both powered and light-weight.

ALONZO: About 75 kilos. It folds. It matches into just about any car very simply. You know, it’s just the good chair for me.

BISAHA: But it’s made in China. When she purchased the new chair last 12 months, tariffs on Chinese items were a sky-high 145%. Alonzo paid an additional $3,500.

ALONZO: There was no cause that I had to pay, you know, double for this chair. None. And, you know, the federal authorities should give me my cash back.

BISAHA: The factor is, though, the federal authorities can’t give her that cash back. That’s because she did not pay the tariff instantly to the authorities. Like most individuals, she paid a enterprise – in her case, UPS – which imported the chair. Now the authorities is refunding UPS, and UPS advised her in an e mail her refund is in the works.

ALONZO: When I got that e mail, I was like, nicely, you know, perhaps there’s hope.

BISAHA: Now, delivery firms have to give the cash back because they explicitly charged prospects tariff charges. That’s according to the dean of Syracuse University’s College of Law, Terence Lau. He says if FedEx got charged 100 bucks to import your package deal, they then billed you 100 bucks.

TERENCE LAU: And now that FedEx and UPS have acquired a refund of that $100 from the federal authorities, they are completely obligated to return it to the particular person they collected it from. Otherwise, it would be a fairly open-and-shut lawsuit against them for unjust enrichment.

BISAHA: UPS, DHL and FedEx all say they are returning tariff {dollars} to prospects. But do not expect the same from retailers. Many of them did not spell out how much prospects were paying for tariffs and instead baked that price instantly into larger costs. So it’s exhausting, perhaps even unattainable, for the firms to know how much additional each shopper paid because of tariffs.

LAU: It’s like the retailer stirred the tax into the batter. So once it’s cooked into the cake, you can’t just back it out ingredient by ingredient anymore because it’s not separated.

BISAHA: Michael Ettlinger is a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. He says prospects and companies share the price of tariffs. But for the most half, companies are the ones protecting the refund.

MICHAEL ETTLINGER: It’s all just a big switch from customers to companies, which – you can’t actually design a worse tax than that.

BISAHA: Some retailers like Walmart say they’ll use tariff refunds to decrease costs, and firms like Costco and Nintendo are going through class-action lawsuits from buyers demanding refunds. Ettlinger says, nicely, some companies are benefiting.

ETTLINGER: It’s essential to hold an eye on what the actual sin here is, which is that the authorities imposed unlawful tariffs.

BISAHA: Sandra Alonzo (ph) heard from UPS about a month in the past about her refund being processed but hasn’t acquired anything yet.

ALONZO: It’d be good to replace me ’cause I certain would like that cash. It would be very helpful proper now, contemplating how costly everything is now, a 12 months later.

BISAHA: UPS says it takes up to three months to get the refunds it receives from the authorities to prospects. Of course, Alonzo’s paid larger costs at loads of retailers because of tariffs. So for her, this is one refund on the method and many more unlikely to come.

Stephan Bisaha, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE IRONSIDES’ “LIGURIAN DREAM”)

FADEL: I’ll just observe here – UPS is a monetary supporter of NPR.

Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our web site phrases of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further data.

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may fluctuate. Transcript textual content may be revised to right errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its authentic broadcast or publication. The authoritative document of NPR’s programming is the audio document.