Megan Sweeney wants hundreds of thousands of dollars back that her business spent on tariffs over the past year.
There’s one problem: She hasn’t been able to log into the government’s website for refunds.
Sweeney, CEO of Pacific International Bearing, a California-based company that sells ball bearings, has spent several weeks trying to access an online US Customs and Border Protection portal known as ACE before she can apply for a tariff refund.
No one at PIB has logged on to the website in years, Sweeney said. On Tuesday, she spent an hour and a half on the phone with CBP, attempting to reset the password, before gaining access. “We never had the need to be active on the ACE portal,” she said.
While some businesses have started seeing refund payments land in their accounts, others are still trying to file their refunds or gather the records they need to do so. It’s especially tough for companies like Sweeney’s, which can’t tie up capital for long and don’t have the staff that bigger corporations do.
“For a small business, the process is much more difficult with limited time and resources,” she said.
CBP did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
In late April, a spokesperson told Business Insider that the agency was experiencing higher call volumes and longer wait times as its online portal saw more users. CBP added new help options, such as a self-service password reset option and a callback feature, the spokesperson said at the time.
CBP said in a recent court filing that it had approved about $35.5 billion in tariff refunds as of May 11.
A little-used website becomes essential
Accessing ACE remains one of the hurdles companies face in getting a refund, said Justin Sherlock, cofounder and CEO of AI tariff software provider Caspian.
Some of Caspian’s customers are in a similar position and have spent weeks contacting CBP support to get their login credentials, Sherlock told Business Insider.
The website is similar to the IRS’s tax transcripts, which show a taxpayer’s tax history, Sherlock said: Everyone can access their transcript, but few ever do.
“If you were doing fewer than a couple thousand shipments a year, your tariff bill wasn’t material,” Sherlock said. “Maybe your customs broker had access to ACE to process transactions with customs on your behalf.”
Dame Products, a sexual wellness brand, reimbursed customers for the cost of tariffs after the Supreme Court’s February ruling that Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional.
The company spent over a week trying to file its refund application, which it did on April 28, after multiple phone calls to the agency to verify its login credentials, cofounder Alexandra Fine told Business Insider.
Fine said she expects Dame to receive its refund within the next few weeks.
Tariff errors complicate refund requests
Businesses are also dealing with other issues as they apply for tariff refunds.
Many businesses import goods with the help of brokers, some of whom list themselves as the importers of record on customs paperwork, Sherlock said. That means the companies they work for won’t get a refund until the broker applies for one, he said.
The federal government is also rejecting refund claims if there are errors on the customs entries. As of late April, the last time that CBP released figures, the agency said that it had rejected about 19% of refund claims.
Those errors can take many forms, said Emil Stefanutti, CEO at Gaia Dynamics, which creates trade compliance software and has been helping companies audit their refund requests.
Some tariff entries charged importers for the wrong amount, Steffanutti said. On others, the imported goods were misidentified. Companies have to correct those errors and resubmit their refund requests.
“I recently saw a Louis Vuitton bag being classified as a turbo propeller,” Stefanutti said. “It can be that crazy.”
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