The tariff refund your supplier kept

The Supreme Court decided the question in February. On February 20, 2026, in Learning Resources v. Trump, the Court held that “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” The next question is who gets the money back.

The refund follows the importer of record

A supplier can be the importer of record for the parts it sells you. When it is, the buyer paid a price and the supplier paid the duty.

The refund process matches that. Customs and Border Protection activated its CAPE refund system on April 20, 2026. A law-firm summary published on April 24 says that “The CAPE refund mechanism operates exclusively at the importer-of-record level.” A July 24 alert from another firm, about importers that went to court, describes CBP refunding any overpayment to the importer of record. Counsel for each of those importers is to receive instructions to submit the importer of record number to CBP to gain access to CAPE.

Read that plainly. If your supplier was the importer of record, the claim is the supplier’s. If the duty came to you as a higher unit price, the CAPE mechanism does not reach you. What you have is the contract.

Where it stands, with dates

It is not settled. The most recent source I could fetch is a client alert dated October 12, 2026. It reports three things:

• Phase 3 opened October 6. CBP told the Court of International Trade it was “successfully deployed.” It covers certain finally liquidated entries, those past the 80-day period.
• It is limited. The importer must be a plaintiff in a court case, with its entries covered by an order directing reliquidation. The alert calls a specific court order the only sure path to qualifying for refunds.
• The appeal is pending. In the Federal Circuit case, the government argues that CBP lacks authority to reliquidate entries past a certain point. On October 8, in the other leading case, the trade court granted class action status to a group of plaintiffs, and the alert says the government intends to appeal that.

I am not going to guess how that comes out. The point for a buyer is narrower: the refund mechanisms described so far run between the government and the importer of record.

The duty moved under the price

A temporary 10 percent surcharge took effect February 24, 2026 under section 122, “for a period of 150 days.” Then a Section 301 action took effect for products entered on or after July 24, 2026. A supplier who repriced in February may not have repriced since. The price may not have been reconciled to the duty.

Surcharge or unit price

How the increase arrived decides how hard it is to unwind.

A separate surcharge line is attached to a stated cause. If the cause goes away, the line goes away, and the conversation is short. A duty folded into the unit price has no label. It is now just the price, and taking it out means arguing about what the old price was.

Everyone budgeted for the duty. Nobody asked who was the importer of record.

My read is that the contract is the whole claim. Look for the clause on duty changes and check whether it works in both directions: does a decrease flow back to you, or only an increase flow forward. The downward case is the one to read twice.

This is a buyer’s reading of public sources, not legal advice.

One thing to check this week

Pull every price increase since February 2025 that a supplier attributed to tariffs. For each one, write down three things: whether it was a separate surcharge line or inside the unit price, who the importer of record was, and what the contract says about a duty change in either direction. Start with your top ten suppliers by spend. The gaps in that sheet are the questions to ask.