The Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Left One Question Open. Consumers Are Now Filing Suit Over It.

When the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs in February, it left one question entirely unanswered: if companies had already passed those costs to consumers through higher prices, and the government now refunds those duties to the importer of record, who makes the consumer whole? A proposed class action filed March 12 against Costco Wholesale by an Illinois member named Matthew Stockov is one of at least five suits, identified by Bloomberg News, that are now pressing that question in federal court. The suit names a proposed class of more than 100 people with aggregate claims exceeding $5 million. Costco did not respond to a request for comment.

FedEx and EssilorLuxottica, the maker of Ray-Ban sunglasses, were among those named in earlier filings, the Associated Press reported. Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School, told the AP he expected more such suits to emerge, particularly against companies that itemized tariff charges on invoices or receipts. He noted that the legal viability of these cases “is not clear-cut,” but that the suits create pressure on businesses to share any refunds they secure.

The Structural Problem the Suits Are Built On

Filed by Chicago attorney George Zelcs of Korein Tillery, the complaint identifies what it calls a “structural inequity” at the center of the federal refund process. Under trade law, the importer of record is the default party entitled to recover duties paid to the government. Consumers who bore those costs through elevated retail prices have no automatic claim on those proceeds. Costco filed its own suit in the Court of International Trade in late November 2025, seeking a declaration that IEEPA tariffs were unlawful and a full refund of duties paid. If that suit succeeds, the complaint argues, Costco will have recovered costs from the government that it had already recovered from its customers through higher prices, which the filing describes as “double recovery.”

The implication for companies that were both importer of record and direct seller to consumers differs from the situation facing companies that were downstream buyers from importers. For retailers and brands that imported directly, the structural inequity argument cuts most sharply: the refund flows to them by operation of law, while the consumers they charged sit outside the refund process entirely. For brands and distributors that purchased imported goods at tariff-inflated prices from a separate importer, the analogous question runs through vendor and supply chain relationships, not through the government refund process.

A Pledge, and What the Complaint Does With It

Costco CEO Ron Vachris addressed the refund question directly at the top of the company’s March 5 earnings call, one day after the Court of International Trade issued its initial order directing CBP to process IEEPA refunds. Citing how the company had handled past legal recoveries, Vachris said the company’s commitment would be to return any refund value to members “through lower prices and better values,” adding that Costco would “be transparent in how we plan to do this, if and when we receive any refunds,” as CFO Dive reported from the Seeking Alpha transcript. He characterized the overall situation as “extremely fluid” and said the IEEPA tariffs had been replaced with new tariffs expected to remain in place for “at least the next 150 days.”

Attorneys for the plaintiffs read the pledge differently. The complaint characterizes Vachris’s commitment as a promise of “possible future benefit to an indeterminate group of future shoppers,” a formulation the suit distinguishes from a binding obligation to the specific customers who paid elevated prices. The distinction matters because the suit seeks a proportionate share of any government refund Costco receives, not a downstream pricing benefit whose timing and recipients are unspecified.

At least as suggested by a KPMG survey of 300 U.S.-based C-suite and business leaders at organizations with annual revenues above $1 billion, conducted between February 9 and 24, 2026, and shared with CFO Dive and Fortune, Costco’s consumer-facing posture sits outside what most large-company executives said they planned to do. Only 18% of survey respondents said they would fully reverse tariff-related price hikes. Customer credits or rebates ranked last among intended uses of any refund proceeds, at 4%.

The Refund Process Itself Remains Unresolved

For companies that were importers of record, the path to actually receiving a government refund is procedurally unsettled. PwC’s post-ruling analysis found that the Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, a 6-3 decision holding that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, left refund mechanics to lower courts and administrative processes. The Court of International Trade issued an initial order on March 4 directing CBP to liquidate unprocessed entries and reliquidate recently finalized ones without IEEPA tariffs applied. Two days later, CBP filed a declaration stating its systems could not handle the volume and requested time to build a dedicated portal. The CIT suspended its order pending that development.

On March 12, CBP filed an updated declaration with the CIT describing the architecture of its new Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system. Under the proposed framework, importers will file a declaration in the CAPE portal listing all entries on which IEEPA duties were paid. The system will validate entries, recalculate duties without IEEPA tariffs, and aggregate refunds with interest by importer. Treasury will then issue electronic payments. CBP estimates the portal will be operational in approximately 45 days, though the agency acknowledged that certain categories of entries will not initially be processable through the system.

A comparable 1998 Supreme Court ruling provides the closest available reference point for what CBP now faces. That ruling invalidated the Harbor Maintenance Tax on exports and set off a refund process covering a far smaller pool of importers and claims, and Hunton and Fresh Fruit Portal both documented that the process still took years to work through. CBP’s declaration to the CIT put the scale of the current situation at $166 billion in collected duties across 330,000 importers and 53 million entries. Benesch and BDO both noted in their post-ruling guidance that even after the portal becomes technically operational, the full refund process, including claim review and payment, could extend for years. Following the February 20 decision, President Trump invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a temporary 10% duty on most imported goods, and Section 232 tariffs on categories including steel and aluminum remain in effect, according to PwC. CBP has stated that refunds will only be issued electronically; as of its March 6 declaration, approximately 2,897 importers covering about 7,700 refund transactions could not be paid due to missing ACH enrollment.

How Supply Chain Position Changes the Question

Taken together, the consumer litigation and the CBP process surface a set of questions that apply differently depending on where a company sat in the import chain during the tariff period.

For companies that were importers of record, including large retailers and CPG brands that imported finished goods or raw materials directly, the immediate work involves two parallel tracks. The first is procedural: ACH enrollment, entry data organization, and in some cases legal action to preserve refund rights for already-liquidated entries. The second track is relational: assessing whether vendor, supplier, or customer agreements create obligations to share any refunds received. Luis “Lou” Abad, a principal in KPMG’s Washington National Tax, Trade and Customs Services group, told Fortune that the importer of record pays duties and would receive any refund, but that this raises immediate questions about whether and how to share that value with customers or suppliers. “It’s pretty murky how the importers will get the refunds,” Abad said. In his comments to CFO Dive on the consumer litigation specifically, Abad said reviewing tariff-sharing arrangements entered with vendors, suppliers, and customers, and understanding whether sharing is contractually required or a matter of good will, would be “the next step or shoe to drop.”

The Abad analysis and the Jones Walker client alert on downstream buyer recovery describe the same set of transactions from opposite ends: the importer assessing what it may owe downstream, and the buyer assessing what it may be able to recover upstream. Jones Walker, writing for retail and CPG clients, noted that downstream buyers who can document explicit tariff pass-through may have recovery claims against importers of record, with the strength of any claim depending on the quality of that documentation. For brands that scaled import or wholesale activity rapidly during the tariff period, the implication of Jones Walker’s analysis is that documentation is more likely to consist of general price adjustments than explicit surcharges or cost-plus structures, which Jones Walker identifies as the weakest factual pattern for recovery.

Congress Asks Whether Refunds Will Reach Consumers

On February 24, four days after the Supreme Court ruling, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Peter Welch wrote to President Trump calling for a plan to return tariff funds to consumers and small businesses. Addressed to the White House, the letter stated that roughly 95% of the $175 billion in collected IEEPA tariffs, a figure the senators attributed to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, had been passed on to American families and small businesses through higher costs. Among the questions the senators posed was whether the administration would impose requirements to ensure importers that received refunds passed them through to consumers and small businesses further down the supply chain. No public commitment to such a mechanism had emerged from the administration as of the letter’s writing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, quoted in the letter from a C-SPAN clip, said he had “a feeling the American people won’t see it.”

Stockov’s proposed class is small, more than 100 members with aggregate claims exceeding $5 million, against a backdrop of $166 billion in collected duties. Its legal theory addresses a gap that federal trade law does not close on its own. Appleton noted that the suits’ viability remains unproven, which cuts in both directions: companies facing consumer claims cannot assume they will lose, but a pledge of future pricing benefit may not satisfy a court asked to order direct restitution to identifiable past purchasers. How courts handle that distinction, and how long the CBP process takes to deliver actual refunds, will determine whether the Stockov filing is an isolated event or a template.

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