On May 12, entrepreneur Sarah Wells was delighted to suddenly see nearly $10,000 appear in her bank account as if by magic. But it wasn’t sorcery; it was the first of two tariff refunds arriving from Customs and Border Protection. Wells had applied for—and eventually got—a total of $15,741 back from the government, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in February which found that the “Liberation Day” levies from the Trump administration last year were illegal.
Wells’ business, which sells breast pumps, pump bags and apparel to breastfeeding moms across the nation, not only has had to pay thousands of dollars in extra tariffs under both of President Donald Trump’s administrations, but also lost about $500,000 in sales last summer due to supply chain problems caused by the new international levies, Wells tells Forbes. She says her experience as a business owner dealing with the tariffs has been a “saga,” and that she is still concerned it’s far from over.
The second chunk of her money eventually showed up in her bank account on June 25, again without warning or preamble. Wells, 45, says getting the refund was far from easy. Rather, she describes the process as “full of acronyms, strange vocabulary, clunky and glitchy,” and she says there are “all sorts of weird quirks” to the CBP portal system for entrepreneurs to navigate.
“It’s really cumbersome, and there’s just been no transparency on timeline” for when refunds will be processed, much less actually delivered, Wells tells Forbes. And that’s despite the fact that she’s a registered importer of record, which means she was importing directly from overseas, as opposed to purchasing necessary overseas materials through a middleman such as UPS or FedEx.
For Wells, the tariff tale began almost a decade ago, in 2017, when the first Trump administration added new levies to imports from China, where her longtime bag manufacturer was headquartered. That first round, she says, added 25% to the overall costs for her 100 or so products, since she hasn’t been able to find an American manufacturer and was importing most of her goods from China. Plus, she was already shelling out for a 17% base tariff that had been in place for Chinese imports prior to the new Trump levy. Still, Sarah Wells Bags managed to survive Trump’s first administration, and when he reentered the White House in 2025, she was ready to pivot to a new manufacturer in Cambodia, in the hope that Trump’s longtime focus on Chinese competition would spare smaller Asian countries.
Then came “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, when the second Trump administration rolled out even heftier tariffs on international goods, justified under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). This time, Cambodia was also hit—with a new tariff of 30% layered on top of an existing 19% levy. “Three weeks after my Cambodia order was placed [it] was Liberation Day, and a 49% tariff on Cambodia,” Wells says. “I really felt like I had, as an American business, done all the right things, tried to manufacture here but couldn’t. Heard the message, ‘No more China,’ moved out of China, and wherever I was going, this IEEPA tariff was tracking me down and making it nearly impossible to make bags.”
The timing was particularly bad for Wells, since it left her with an inventory shipment from China to pay for as well as a new order from Cambodia, both with new tariffs on them. The Washington, D.C.-based entrepreneur cut her small staff from seven to five and worried she might have to close up shop for good. Over the summer of 2025, the tariffs forced her to cancel some of her inventory orders, which meant she ran out of stock and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales that she otherwise would have made if her supply chain hadn’t been interrupted. “We were talking about going back to packing the boxes ourselves, like, just what are we going to do to survive this?” Wells recalls. “We got as small and as scrappy as possible.”
So Wells was overjoyed in February of this year when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the new IEEPA tariffs and ordered CBP to refund the $166 billion American companies had paid under them.
Even with her background as a public policy wonk (she spent about 14 years in Washington working various roles for Women in Government and the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care), Wells found it hard to navigate the tariff refund portal CBP opened on April 20. For instance, Wells says, if a user logs into the portal but then takes no action for a few days, the user gets locked out and has to spend hours on the phone with customer service at CBP to regain access, simply to finish inputting a refund request.
Despite winning her full refund, Wells says she’s still uneasy about the future tariff landscape, and says she’s holding onto the money in case she has to use it to pay for more incoming levies by the Trump administration, given that’s what the President has said are on the way.
“I’m thrilled to have it all back, but I’m just going to have to sit on that money in anticipation of paying (more) tariffs next month, so I’m frustrated and upset that I cannot immediately put this refund to use, rehiring/product development, to fill some of the holes created by the tariff this past year,” Wells writes in a follow-up email to Forbes this week.
Apply Now, then Be Prepared to Wait
Jon Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, says that Wells’ experience is unfortunately one of the better outcomes thus far, since she was able to obtain a refund. As of late May, CBP had said publicly that just $21 billion out of $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs had yet been refunded to American businesses, though it said $85 billion in refund requests had been processed.
A spokesperson for CBP writes in an email to Forbes that small businesses should check out the agency website, which it noted has a list of frequently asked questions and answers for stakeholders, along with other resources for businesses seeking refunds.
“CBP hosts webinars for small businesses on IEEPA duty refunds and businesses can sign up for the Cargo Systems Messaging Service to have the latest information regarding CAPE sent directly to them via email,” the spokesperson writes.
Meanwhile, Gold says the NRF has plenty of members that have taken out second or even third mortgages on their homes, or other types of burdensome loans, to pay for the new tariffs and keep their businesses afloat. That makes any tariff refund cash back “critically important” to small businesses like Wells’, he says.
The NRF and other trade associations stand ready to help small businesses navigate the complex tariff refund process, which is technically called CAPE (short for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries), Gold says. He advises any business owner owed any amount of the $166 billion to apply for it as quickly as possible, but warns that the process will take some time to play out. Each tariff refund application, he says, takes about 60 to 90 days for CBP to evaluate before any money changes hands.
Gold also suggests that anyone owed a refund begin by reading the CBP website carefully, which he credited with providing a lot of good information for businesses that are owed tariff money back.
Make Sure You’re Not in Arrears on Tariffs
Gold warns that a refund application could even backfire and result in CBP notifying a given company that it’s actually on the hook for more money to the federal government, depending on whether the business is in arrears for other tariffs.
“We’ve certainly heard some stories where Customs has gone through these entries and they found that there were other issues,” Gold says. “They’ve done what they called ‘offsets,’ so that the tariff you paid would pay for that, whatever that issue was. We’ve heard some that have actually gotten additional bills, saying, ‘Oh, by the way, you actually owe more money. So you’re not getting a refund.’”
“So one of the things we’ve certainly tried to impress upon our members is, before you go and do your refund request, make sure your entries are clean,” Gold advises. “I know for small importers, it’s challenging, because they don’t have customs folks on staff. They’re relying on their customs brokers or trade attorneys or someone else to make sure that’s all accurate.”
Gold says the refund process applies to both importers of record, such as Wells, but also any company that had to pay extra for goods imported through middlemen.
“Make sure they’re talking to wherever they utilize to see if they’re getting the refund and then would pay that back as well,” Gold says of larger importers such as UPS and FedEx. “It’s incumbent upon the small businesses to go back out to those companies who they’ve utilized, and say, ‘What’s the process for me to get my refund back?’”
Get Your ACE Account and Have Entry Numbers Handy
Once a small business has its paperwork all in order, Gold says the refund application steps are fairly straightforward.
“First and foremost, you have to have an account in ACE, the automated commercial environment, which is how (CBP) processes all the trade information,” Gold says, referring to mandatory CBP accounts for the refund procedure. “The second part is you have to have your [bank account] information uploaded as well, because they’re only doing electronic refunds. They’re not doing paper checks any more for refunds.”
Once a given company gets an account set up in the portal, Gold says, “for those that will be able to file, all they needed to do was upload the entry numbers (of imported goods) in a CSV file into the CAPE system, and then Customs would process that.”
Don’t Relax Yet–The Tariff Saga Continues
Both Gold and Wells also note that the tariff saga is far from over, given that the Trump administration has already tried to establish replacement levies for the overturned IEEPA tariffs. One such move — for a 10% global tariff — was already found to be illegal by the Court of International Trade in early May, after the President tried to use the Trade Act of 1974 as a replacement legal justification for new levies.
That, however, was just one attempt by the Trump administration to issue new international tariffs; another is still in the works, which could establish new tariffs in July on 60 countries, ranging from 10% to 12%, Gold says, and a separate possible set of tariffs that could impact 16 countries.
“The question is going to be, how do those all work together? Do they stack? Do they not stack? So for companies who are planning, it’s very difficult for them to know, what’s the price of product going to be when it arrives in the United States?” Gold warns. “That’s where those tariff refunds can help out, to pay for those future tariffs.”
Wells says she knows many of her entrepreneur colleagues have already closed up shop due to tariff pressure, and says she fears how much worse the economic problem may get for small businesses.
“They’re talking about multiple more of (tariffs) coming at the end of July. So I think for a good number of small businesses, new tariffs will be put on them before these refunds are even finished paying out,” Wells says. “So the problem is compounding. The hole is bigger, and being dug deeper and deeper.”
This story has been updated to include a statement from Customs and Border Protection.
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