The money is real and it is moving. More than $166 billion was collected under the IEEPA tariffs across some 53 million entries, and Customs has now sent over $86 billion to Treasury for disbursement.

Whether any of it reaches you depends on something most importers have not checked: whether you filed a lawsuit.

Around 3,700 importers did. For them, the refund process now covers everything. For everyone else, it covers only part of what they paid — and a court ruling expected within weeks will determine whether that changes.

Customs built CAPE to return the duties. It has run in phases, and the phases are the whole story.

Phase 1 opened in April and Phase 2 in June, and both were confined to unliquidated entries and those liquidated within the previous eighty days. Recent imports, in other words.

Phase 3 covers finally liquidated entries — those liquidated more than ninety days ago, under the reliquidation period set by statute. For most importers that means the bulk of what was paid when the tariffs were at their heaviest. Following orders from the Court of International Trade in mid-July, Phase 3 opened. But it opened only to importers who had filed suit at the CIT, because the government’s position is that Customs has no authority to reliquidate a final entry without a court order naming that importer.

So there are two populations. Roughly 3,700 importers who filed and can recover everything. And everyone else, who can recover recent entries administratively and, on the government’s reading, cannot recover the older ones at all.

If you have not checked which side of that line you are on, that is this week’s work. Your customs broker can produce the entry ages in a morning.

Two motions for class certification are before the CIT — in V.O.S. Selections and in Freestyle World — and both were argued in August. If granted, importers who never sued could obtain refunds by submitting a claims form rather than initiating litigation, which is the administrative outcome most finance functions assumed was coming anyway.

The rulings are expected shortly, and will almost certainly be appealed by whoever loses to the Federal Circuit. Final resolution may not arrive before the end of the year. That the court selected Freestyle World, which carries a pending certification motion, as a vehicle for tracking the refund program may say something about where it is leaning.

Separately, the government’s appeal of the CIT’s authority to order relief for non-plaintiff importers is already pending at the Federal Circuit. That appeal could unwind the position even for those who did file.

The trap in waiting. The statute of limitations under 28 U.S.C. § 1581 runs two years, and it is already running on the earliest IEEPA entries. An importer who waits for class certification, sees it denied or overturned on appeal, and then decides to file may find the window has closed on exactly the entries worth the most.

That is an unusual shape of decision for a finance function. The cost of filing is legal fees and management time. The cost of not filing is a permanent loss that only becomes visible after it is irreversible.

And filing got easier in July. The CIT rescinded the administrative order that had automatically stayed newly filed refund cases. An importer filing today can immediately request the same reliquidation relief the existing litigants have, rather than joining a queue. Holland & Knight titled its client alert on the point “File Now,” which is not language law firms use casually.

Assume the refund arrives. It is not obvious that it is yours.

The refund goes to the importer of record. Whether the importer of record bore the cost is a different question, and in most supply chains the answer is no, or not entirely. Tariffs were passed along — into prices, into surcharges, into contract adjustments — and the paper trail sits in commercial agreements written at speed in 2025.

Mettler-Toledo has said the quiet part out loud. Claiming roughly $53 million, it told investors it expects to refund a significant portion to its own customers, and to pursue its own suppliers for amounts it absorbed. Two directions at once, and both determined by contract language rather than by who received the government’s money.

Nothing about receiving a refund forces that question. But a customer who paid a tariff surcharge and later learns the tariff was refunded will ask it, and the answer will be in the contract either way.

The refunds are gain contingencies, which under ASC 450-30 means recognition turns on judgment rather than on receipt. Three companies have made that judgment differently.

FIGS recognized once Customs accepted its Phase I claims, treating recovery as probable and reasonably estimable, and booked $20.5 million.

Energizer recognized on the strength of the court rulings establishing the legal right, and took a $64 million benefit through cost of goods sold.

Mettler-Toledo has recognized nothing, citing uncertainty over the appeals and over final liquidation amounts.

All three are defensible. They differ on when a contingent gain becomes sufficiently certain — at judicial determination of the right, at administrative acceptance of the claim, or not until the appeals are exhausted. Which means peer comparisons this period are not comparing like with like, and a competitor’s margin may carry a benefit yours has deferred.

Our take: the eligibility question is the one with a clock on it, and it is the one being ignored. Ownership and recognition can be worked through in September. Whether you are inside the refund process or outside it is determined by a filing decision, and the statute of limitations does not pause while a class certification motion is argued.

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The base case flipped on Friday, and it took twenty minutes.

Kevin Warsh delivered his first Jackson Hole keynote as Chair and declined, again, to publish a reaction function — the circumstances under which the Fed would move. He was pointed on inflation: this summer’s better-than-expected readings, he said, do not tell him that underlying trends have meaningfully improved. He described himself as impressed with the economy’s strength. He hinted rates may need to go higher if progress stalls.

He committed to nothing. Markets moved anyway. Futures had a September hold at 60% on Tuesday morning when we published; a hike is now the base case at just under 60%. It has firmed since Friday rather than faded, which is the part that matters — post-speech repricings frequently unwind by mid-week, and this one has not.

Seventeen points on a speech containing no guidance is worth sitting with, because it tells you what the planning environment actually is. Warsh has been explicit that markets should not be looking to the Fed for their next trade, and he has removed the instrument finance teams used to anchor a rate assumption. There is no scheduled signal between now and September 16.

The reader tally: when we asked in July, 25% of you picked September and 31% said no move at all this year. The market has now come round to the first group and away from the second.

Four things every CFO needs to know this week.

· The supply arrived and the stock went up. SpaceX has recovered above its $135 offer price, having risen roughly 35% in the five sessions after its first lockup expiry — the release that was supposed to bury it. The second tranche of 319 million shares came free on August 20 and passed without incident. Then on August 14 the company issued 389 million new shares to acquire Cursor. A company whose equity was being described as an overhang six weeks ago is now using it as acquisition currency.

· Your float on December 31 may set your filer status under a rule that does not exist yet. If the SEC’s filer status proposal is adopted in the first half of next year and effective by August, calendar-year registrants would assess status as of December 31, 2026 — four months from now, against a $2 billion threshold in a rule still in comment. Companies would have until late 2027 to perform the assessment, but the measurement date has already been set by a proposal that is not final.

· There is a third proposal, and it is the one for private companies. Alongside semiannual reporting and filer status, the SEC has proposed registered offering reform — expanding Form S-3 eligibility and allowing incorporation by reference into Form S-1. It is designed to work with the filer status changes: extend the accommodations, then make sure the companies receiving them can still raise capital efficiently. For anyone weighing a listing, the three proposals together are a materially cheaper public company than the one that exists today.

· And a detail from the semiannual proposal worth knowing. The election is not permanent. A company would switch by checking a box on the cover of its Form 10-K, and would have to check it again every year. Miss it and you revert to quarterly filing for that fiscal year. Whatever a company decides, the decision becomes an annual calendar item rather than a one-time change of policy.

1. Which side of the line are you on? Ask your customs broker for your IEEPA entries by liquidation date. Entries unliquidated or liquidated within eighty days are inside CAPE Phases 1 and 2. Anything liquidated more than ninety days ago is finally liquidated and sits in Phase 3, which is open only to importers who have filed at the CIT. This is a report, not a project, and nothing else can be decided without it.

2. If you have finally liquidated exposure, what is it worth? Put a number on it. The filing decision is a straightforward cost-benefit once you know what is at stake, and it is impossible before then. Note that the earliest entries are usually the largest, because that is when the rates were highest.

3. Have you preserved anything? Administrative protests and post-summary corrections were available earlier and may have preserved rights. If your trade team filed either, you may be better positioned than you think. If not, litigation is the remaining route.

4. What do your contracts say about tariff surcharges — in both directions? If you passed tariff costs to customers, read what happens when the cost reverses. If you absorbed costs your suppliers passed to you, you may have a claim against them independent of anything Customs pays. Most agreements written in 2025 do not address reversal, which is itself the answer.

5. Have you written down why you recognized, or did not? Whatever position you take under ASC 450-30, the memo matters more than the answer. Three public companies reached three different conclusions on identical facts. Yours needs a stated rationale before an auditor asks for one.

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Most of corporate finance is about deciding what to do with money you expected. This is the opposite: money nobody budgeted, from a decision nobody controlled, arriving on terms determined by whether somebody filed a form eighteen months ago.

The companies that treat it as found money will book it and explain it later. The ones that treat it as a deadline will find out this week whether they are inside the process or outside it.

One question before you go: where are you on tariff refunds?

One click. And if you have a view on why, reply — we read everything.

The Editors hold no position in any company mentioned.

— The CFO Desk
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