Importers say the issue is complicated. Though many raised prices, they often did not increase them by enough to fully offset the tariff expense. <\/p>\n
The tariffs also often triggered other kinds of costs, forcing businesses to take on debt to pay for the duties and leading to harder-to-quantify hits like lost sales.<\/p>\n
“Even if we do get refunds, we are still not going to be made entirely whole,” Kacie Wright of Houghton Horns, a small Texas-based business that imports musical instruments, said during a forum hosted by We Pay the Tariffs, a small business advocacy group.<\/p>\n
She said just making sure her business was lined up to receive a refund has been costly, requiring more than six months of back-and-forth with customs officials to properly register in the agency’s online system. <\/p>\n
Customs has placed the burden on firms to assemble information to make claims, says lawyer Jared Slipman, chair of the tax department at Obermayer, which has been advising businesses on the process.<\/p>\n
He says some businesses, especially smaller ones, may look at the requirements and decide that the potential “juice is not worth the squeeze”. He expects others may eventually have to turn to litigation to fully recoup what they believe they are owed.<\/p>\n
Consumers, he adds, “get the worst of it”.<\/p>\n
“It may very well be the case that this is an orchestrated theft from the American consumer… and that would be very unfortunate,” Slipman says. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Importers say the issue is complicated. Though many raised prices, they often did not increase them by enough…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-884248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116379459584085964","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}