00:00The U.S. government's new refund system for companies to reclaim illegally collected tariffs went live on Monday
00:06and immediately triggered a rush of claims from thousands of businesses.
00:11One of them is Toymaker Basic Fun.
00:13Chief Executive Jay Foreman had his team ready in a quote war room at company headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.
00:20They were prepared to start filing when the system opened at 8 a.m. Eastern Time.
00:24The firm needed to upload more than 500 files, which can be submitted in batches.
00:29It was hugely important because this money is very important to the company.
00:34I mean, we were charged over $7 million in tariffs last year.
00:38That took a huge chunk of our profits away.
00:42And we need those funds to reinvest this year in our product line.
00:46We needed to reinvest in our business and our people.
00:50And we needed just to keep our cash flow, you know, steady for the year going forward.
00:55Foreman said the past year had been a very up and down roller coaster.
00:58He says smaller firms like his faced extra pressure, unable to pass higher costs on to powerful buyers intent on
01:04keeping prices low.
01:06Leading up to Monday, Foreman had worried whether the system would work.
01:09I was very concerned because there's over 300,000 importers that were charged tariffs.
01:17And I'm pretty concerned and was pretty concerned and still am pretty concerned that this system is going to get
01:24overloaded.
01:25So the team was here at 7 o'clock in the morning, even though we had people monitoring the portal
01:29all night to see if it opened early.
01:31The U.S. Supreme Court in February struck down the tariffs that Donald Trump had imposed using a national emergency
01:37law.
01:38That ruling could lead to as much as $166 billion being returned to importers.
01:43As of early April, over 56,000 firms had already completed the required steps to claim about $127 billion in
01:51refunds.
01:52It's not clear how quickly the repayments will be processed.
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