The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't

Posted by cdrnsf 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by kazinator 1 day ago

> meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

Assuming nobody looks at the requirements of the problem to write a single line of code in order to tool up to the task.

Comment by budman1 10 hours ago

Many lifetimes ago I worked on a project where all customer desired changes were 'scoped' by engineering. A little report was written about how the change could be implemented, to include any possible complications and a LOC estimate. My manager, did not want us to do a customer desired change. So he wrote the 'impact report'. The problem basically required taking functionality that applied to 1 thing, and made it apply to an (existing) array of things. His solution was as if arrays did not exist, and the resulting LOC was N times bigger than it actually was going to be. Of course, this change was not authorized until the manager left, and someone that knew it was BS spoke up. Same thing here.

Comment by arealaccount 1 day ago

They'd have to beef up the servers to accommodate the extra processing and we all know how much RAM costs these day

Comment by b112 1 day ago

CBP says it needs 45 days to build new software before it can start writing checks.

Honestly? It doesn't seem unreasonable if it really is 45 days.

Imagine if they started working on software additions for mass refunds, and the decision went the other way? And they didn't have to refund?

Wouldn't they be wasting money for no reason?

Comment by mandevil 1 day ago

Then they should have mentioned that in their court filings!

The reason that the tariffs were collected while there was doubts as to their legality is that the US Government promised, in court filings (courts literally marked this as estoppel in a ruling: they are unable to change their mind on it, locked in argument) that they could repay this easily, and so courts allowed them to collect it while they figured out the legality. When they promised this, if it did require software changes, they should have done that then, or else they were lying to courts.

This is why the judges are not giving them any slack here. They promised to courts that this could be done easily, in such a way that they can't change their mind now. This is all very basic tenets of law that even non-lawyers can understand.

Comment by ElevenLathe 1 day ago

They would at least be wasting "their own" (taxpayer) money, instead of punishing random importers with chaotic effects to our entire globalized system of political economy.

Comment by psadauskas 1 day ago

How many hours did it take to charge all those illegal tariffs, though? Surely not the 500 years they say it'll take to refund them /s

Comment by avanticc 15 hours ago

Claiming it takes 5 minutes of manual work per entry while also saying it would take 45 days to build a software solution is a strange contradiction. In any private sector logistics setup, if you have 53 million records to untangle, you don't even consider the manual route; you spend the first 30 days building the parser and the next 15 days running edge-case tests. The fact that they are even presenting the '4.4 million hours' figure as a viable metric for the court shows how disconnected the administrative process is from modern data engineering.

Comment by simonw 1 day ago

> CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

Comment by nisegami 1 day ago

Unemployment numbers about to drop like a rock.

Comment by fwipsy 1 day ago

44000000 / 2000 hours/year = 2200 jobs for 1 year. *50k/year = $110,000,000

Comment by mattnewton 1 day ago

So you’re telling me we could do this all for just a few million dollars more than the price of the three fighter jets recently shot down over Kuwait, and provide good American jobs while doing so? Sounds like a deal.

(In reality it would be more expensive because you would have to source, train, and administer those people plus audit the results afterwards. But the government had said it would be doable before to the courts!)

Comment by tocs3 1 day ago

You should add in time for training.

Comment by nisegami 14 hours ago

Or 1 job for 2200 years

Comment by greatgib 1 day ago

When there is no financial data to steal or person to randomly fire, suddenly there is not anymore 20 years old DOGE morons pretending to be able to fix the system overnight...

Comment by protimewaster 1 day ago

While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.

I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.

Comment by solid_fuel 1 day ago

> While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

No, I disagree. It is actually quite hard to see how this scenario arises without intentional malfeasance. This isn't something that was overlooked, the government was specifically asked in court it they would be able to issue refunds quickly if the tariffs were overturned. The government lied and said they could.

This isn't some surprise thing where we can just forgive these guys in the government for not accounting for the potential need for refunds. They were asked. They lied.

Comment by protimewaster 1 day ago

My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible. From a strictly technical standpoint, if your boss says "Make this happen ASAP, even if you have to cut corners", and then a year later says, "Undo all of that", it's gonna be a shitshow.

I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by FireBeyond 22 hours ago

> My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible.

I would generally be surprised if the judge just accepted the attorney's answer without instructing them to have that conversation. I can't imagine a judge saying "Yeah, sure, I'm sure you're the right person to ask this technical question".

Comment by AdmiralAsshat 1 day ago

Well Trump's track record of "No Plan-B" has historically worked out for him pretty well so far. He had ample reason to think the SCOTUS--which has been giving him a green light to act like a god-king up to this point--would have his back on this as well, in which case who cares if his backup plan turned out to be complete rubbish?

Comment by fwipsy 1 day ago

I wouldn't say it's complete rubbish because that implies there was a plan at all

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by LorenPechtel 10 hours ago

Working as designed. Yet another court order they never intended to comply with.

Comment by kgwxd 1 day ago

Sorry fools, they got your money. Everyone that voted for this, deserves to lose everything.

Comment by onlypassingthru 1 day ago

The importers are the beneficiaries of any refunds. Those of us that paid the higher prices because of tariffs will just enjoy the camaraderie of being screwed over as a collective group, twice.

Comment by kgwxd 23 hours ago

The importers definitely voted for this, and funded campaigns to get other people to vote for it. Jacking up prices won't work this time, everyone is already broke af.

Comment by josefritzishere 1 day ago

I can't think of a constructive way to respond to news this dumb. Anyone have a silver lining?

Comment by Herring 1 day ago

China's GDP (PPP) overtook the US in 2016. It is currently ~30% higher and will reach double by 2035. They haven't dropped bombs on foreign soil in over 40 years.

Comment by tgv 1 day ago

Who cares about a few Uygurs, right? Or the Chinese Seas. Or Tibet and Taiwan. You can say what you want, but China is not a silver lining.

Comment by Herring 1 day ago

Would you rather live next to a domestic abuser or a serial killer? That's the math a lot of countries are doing right now. It's hard for Americans to understand because they've never been invaded or even credibly threatened with invasion. (And yes, the US does plenty of domestic abuse too.)

Comment by soperj 1 day ago

Who cares about undocumented immigrants, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Iraq, or Afganistan, or Iraq a second time, or putting Iran into it's current situation by overthrowing a democratically elected government in the 1950s, or Hawaii, or the Virgin Islands, Indigenous people of North America etc etc.

Comment by drecked 1 day ago

Or Cuba…

Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by the U.S. for no good reason at all.

Comment by tgv 1 day ago

I'm not arguing the USA is a good guy. Just that that doesn't make China any better.

Comment by raven12345 1 day ago

China cannot be compared to the two warmongers, the US and Russia, in any dimension.

Comment by fennecfoxy 16 hours ago

Tibetans, uyghurs, etc? Factories full of North Korean workers under the watchful eye of their overlords, modern slavery even of your own people.

As a Kiwi I look at the US, Russia, China, etc as the same. Even the UK (where I now live) is a scarier place than back home.

Comment by spiderfarmer 22 hours ago

How is the US better?

Comment by expedition32 1 day ago

To be brutally honest here: no. Nobody cares.

What people want is stability. Not endless fucking wars.

People in my country don't give a shit about Moses-Jesus. They do care about how much their fuel costs.

Comment by serf 1 day ago

>What people want is stability. Not endless fucking wars.

this of course true for Tibet and Taiwan, too -- you just don't care because that's not where you live.

...and with that attitude globally, we get endless war.

Comment by jaapz 1 day ago

You're a bit naive if you think China is a peace loving country that wouldn't bomb the living shit out of any opposing nation if they could do so without recourse

Even now they are posturing in their "South-Chinese Sea", or as the Filipino's like to call it, the "West-Phillipine Sea". Also, Taiwan, Hong Kong...

And then we haven't even talked about how nice they are to their own citizens.

China is growing in strength and moving towards a new global world order, and the way Trump is fucking up US supremacy at the moment, China might well succeed.

Comment by solid_fuel 1 day ago

> And then we haven't even talked about how nice they are to their own citizens.

Oh no, I haven't heard about that lately. What are they doing? Building camps to mass-inter their own citizens? Disappearing people from airports and then lying about where they are being kept? Withholding welfare funds to punish political enemies? Murdering civilians in the street and calling them domestic terrorists? Employing legal threats to force companies to sell technology for domestic mass surveillance?

Comment by abduhl 1 day ago

In its court filing, the US government admits that "In addition to refunding the IEEPA duties, CBP must also pay importers interest, as required by law." So one silver lining here is that we (because it is the taxpayers who ultimately pay) will actually pay more than was collected on tariffs once interest is considered.

The second silver lining is that, even if CBP does its job, there is another step where the Trump administration will certainly drag its feet again: "If it is determined upon liquidation or reliquidation that excess moneys have been deposited, such that a refund with interest is due to the importer, CBP certifies the refund and interest amounts to the Department of the Treasury, which then employs its own processes to disburse the certified amounts to the importers of record."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.193...

Comment by stevetron 1 day ago

This is like a previous administration trying you re-unite children with their families.