The Tariff Refund Gap: 62% of Companies Expect Money Back. Only 28% Will File.

Why do companies expect tariff refunds but never file?

Because the decision was made in February and the facts changed by April. In KPMG's March 2026 post-SCOTUS survey of executives at billion-dollar U.S. companies, 62 percent expect a tariff refund after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, only 28 percent plan to actively pursue one, and 37 percent of the undecided or non-pursuing say anticipated legal costs outweigh the potential recovery. That spread between owed and pursued is the Refund Gap, and at the scale of duties collected under IEEPA, it is one of the largest pools of unclaimed corporate money in recent memory.

The Refund Gap in one line: most large importers believe tariff recovery is a litigation project, but since CAPE launched in April 2026, recovery for unliquidated and recently liquidated entries is an administrative filing inside ACE, and CBP had accepted roughly $121.75 billion in claims and repaid about $86.3 billion including statutory interest by July 10, 2026. The legal-costs objection is not wrong everywhere, it is wrong for the largest category of entries and right for the smallest.

Last updated: July 28, 2026

The Litigation Illusion, and where it is actually true

The 37 percent are working from a February fact pattern: ruling lands, government resists, lawyers quote litigation budgets. Then CBP built CAPE, and the channel split into two very different economics:

Entry category	Recovery channel	Real cost profile
Unliquidated, or within the CAPE windows	CAPE declaration in ACE, refunds typically 60-90 days post-acceptance	Data preparation, an analyst project
Liquidated, inside the 180-day protest window	Protest under 19 U.S.C. 1514	Moderate, administrative writing
Finally liquidated, claim already filed or protest pending	Await processing, CAPE Phase 3 capability	Low, monitoring
Finally liquidated, no claim ever filed	Court order required, eligibility contested on appeal	Here the legal-costs belief is simply correct

Two-sided honesty matters: for the last row, skepticism is right, and pretending otherwise is how recovery vendors lose credibility. The executive error is applying that last-row logic to the whole book, when the whole book usually sits mostly in the first two rows, where the pursuit cost is measured in analyst-days. The mechanics per row live in our refund guide, the deadline math in the 180-day liquidation guide.

Refund economics in three numbers

A pursue-or-pass decision needs exactly three numbers, all computable from your own entry data:

1. Exposure: duty paid under the struck-down layers, from your ES-003 history, per entity
2. Open share: the portion still inside an administrative channel, CAPE or protest, versus the court-order category
3. Clock profile: how much of the open share expires in the next 90 days, since liquidation dates gate everything

Most companies that shelved the pursuit have computed none of the three. They priced the worst channel, applied it to the whole exposure, and moved on, which is how a nine-figure receivable gets written off by analogy. The 28 percent who are filing are not braver, they are better informed: they split the book by channel before pricing the effort.

What the filing minority knows

The operational insight from the companies already paid: the work is reconciliation, not advocacy. Pull entries, isolate the Chapter 99 layers, verify liquidation status, package declarations, attach the documentation CBP can audit. That is the same entry-grounded data discipline that finds duty leakage generally, which is why companies with a standing financial-visibility layer filed in weeks while everyone else was quoting counsel.

GingerControl is a trade compliance AI platform that helps importers, exporters, and customs brokers classify products, simulate tariff costs, and track policy changes, and its recovery work runs the Refund Gap playbook end to end: exposure computed from filed entries per entity, channel split with deadlines attached, claims packaged with audit-ready documentation, and the finally-liquidated remainder handed to counsel as a sized decision rather than a guess. The three-number view comes out of a free 30-minute compliance audit, which is deliberately shorter than most companies' first internal meeting about whether to have a meeting.

References

[REF 1] KPMG, 2026 Tariff Survey and March 2026 post-SCOTUS follow-up Data cited: 62 percent expect refund, 28 percent pursuing, 37 percent legal-costs objection; N=300 C-suite at $1B+ companies, follow-up N=119 Source: KPMG 2026 tariff survey Published: February-March 2026

[REF 2] Green Worldwide Shipping, CAPE Phase 3 status Data cited: $121.75 billion accepted and $86.3 billion repaid with interest as of July 10, 2026; Phase 3 timing Source: CAPE Phase 3 update Published: July 2026

[REF 3] U.S. Customs and Border Protection, IEEPA duty refunds Data cited: CAPE process, declaration mechanics, refund timing Source: CBP IEEPA duty refunds