Tariffs are often discussed as a fight over trade and prices. But for companies, the harder question may come later: when can money they hope to recover be treated as real?
That issue came up at the March 10, 2026, meeting of the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council, which advises the nation’s main accounting rule-setter, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, where members said tariffs are affecting “just about every industry.”
The basic accounting for tariffs was not the main concern. What drew more attention was the harder judgment call: how a company should account for money it may get back when the refund process is still unsettled.
“Whether to pursue a refund” is the first question, Joe Holmes, chief accounting officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, said. The second is how and when to measure that refund claim.
That matters—strongly. If a company puts that expected refund on its books too soon, its financial statements can start to look more certain than the situation really is. On paper, it may look like money is coming back. In reality, the timing — and even the outcome — may still be unclear.
When Refunds Get Murky
The issue has become more urgent since the U.S. Supreme Court on February 20 ruled that broad tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act could not remain in place because the law did not allow tariffs on that scale. That led importers to quickly review whether they might be able to get back duties they had already paid.
A federal trade court later indicated that refunds may be possible, but the process remains unclear as Customs and Border Protection waits for guidance on how to handle those claims. Later that same day, Trump announced a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and opened Section 301 investigations that could lead to additional country-specific duties. For businesses, that meant they might be owed money from the old tariffs even as they were being hit with a new round of them.
Holmes said the situation is moving quickly, especially when it comes to the administrative steps companies would have to follow to make a claim and actually get cash back. That leaves businesses trying to apply normal accounting rules to facts that are still changing.
And the uncertainty does not stop there. If a company decides to put an expected refund on its books, but later cannot collect the money, it then has to decide when to scale that value back down. In other words, the judgment call does not end with booking the refund. It continues if the cash never shows up.
Rules Meet Uncertainty
That difference — between paying a tariff and actually getting money back — shaped the discussion. Council members did not describe tariffs as something that calls for a rush to rewrite accounting rules. Instead, the tone of the meeting was that the current framework mostly works. The harder part is using it in a situation where the facts are still unsettled.
Tim Codrington of Fidelity Investments said tariffs are affecting “just about every industry.” From there, the discussion turned less on whether accounting rules need to be overhauled and more on how companies should deal with uncertainty inside the rules they already have.
In that sense, the tariff conversation reflected a bigger theme from the meeting. The problem is often not that accounting guidance is missing. It is that businesses are being asked to make careful judgments while the ground is still shifting underneath them.
For investors, that matters because numbers in financial statements can start to feel solid long before the outcome is settled. A tariff bill is straightforward. A refund claim is not. And until the path from one to the other becomes clearer, companies, accountants and investors are all making calls about money that may or may not come back.
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