A law firm has filed a class action suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle asking for Amazon to return to customers any potential IEEPA tariff refunds, including tariffs it is qualified to recover but has not pursued.
The suit asks the court to award any duty funds recovered from the IEEPA tariffs quashed by the U.S. Supreme Court and holds the company responsible for any money that it might obtain under the current restitution process but has not filed to obtain.
The law firm of Hagens Berman filed the suit on behalf of two consumers who purchased goods during the tariff period, asserting:
Amazon collected hundreds of millions of dollars in unlawful tariff costs from consumers by raising prices on imported goods while tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were in effect. Amazon is now legally entitled to recover those costs in full from the federal government. Yet Amazon has refused to seek a refund not because it lacks a legal basis to do so, but because it seeks to curry favor with Trump by allowing the federal government to retain the funds. Amazon’s decision to forgo recovery serves its own political and commercial interests at the direct expense of the consumers who bore the tariff costs in the first place. Amazon has not returned any portion of those costs it passed on to consumers, and it has no intention of doing so. It has, in short, generated and retained a windfall from unlawful government action, and consumers, not Amazon. are the ones left paying for it.
The filing went on to say the dispute that arises does so from a fundamental inequity in the process behind tariff refunds. Only the importer of record can seek a refund for what the suit emphasizes is an unlawfully assessed tariff, and consumers who paid the duty through subsequently higher prices charged by Amazon bore the true economic burden with no direct avenue for redress, the suit insists.
The suit has been undertaken, the filing stated, to force Amazon into returning “funds it collected from millions of consumers to cover IEEPA tariffs between February 2025 and February 2026.”
The lawsuit against Amazon isn’t the only one out there with such claims. Costco recently asked a court to dismiss a similar class action suit, seeking to direct refunds it receives from IEEPA duties to customers who purchased goods during the period when tariffs were in effect, according to the Reuters news service.
