Richard Brown runs Proof Culture, a sneaker accessory company, out of his Ohio home. As a small importer, he's discovered that navigating the U.S. tariff refund system is like trying to find your car after a Supreme Court ruling - disorienting and ultimately fruitless.

On that fateful February day, the Supreme Court struck down most of President Trump's tariffs, which business owners like Brown had been paying for almost a year. Brown was so stunned he stumbled past the bagel shop exit and lost his car in the parking lot. The questions came fast: How would U.S. Customs refund the duties it illegally collected? When might Brown get his money back?

Brown kept an audio diary of his quest, shared with NPR, and his experience illustrates a grim reality: thousands of U.S. businesses may never get back the billions of tariff dollars the government promised to refund.

Immediately after losing the court case, Trump and other U.S. officials began saying refunds could take years. Companies like Costco and Revlon pre-emptively filed lawsuits. Brown doesn't have lawyers or customs brokers - Proof Culture is just him in Ohio and his friend Erron Combs in Virginia. They're sneakerheads selling to other sneakerheads.

"I don't want to be a customs broker when I grow up," Brown says, laughing.

Proof Culture started making custom sneakers, then shifted to sales: laces, cedar shoe trees, storage boxes, crease protectors. They got into importing from China and now Mexico just three years ago in what Brown calls his "express master class of importing, tariff edition." The government owes them up to $25,000 in tariff refunds - about 10% of Proof Culture's revenue last year. That's a lot of shoelaces and advertising.

Like many small importers, they relied on freight-forwarding companies and rarely handled customs forms. To get a refund, that had to change. Brown spent weeks digitizing old purchase orders, building an AI tool to track shipping invoices, and leaving futile voicemails with Chinese freight-forwarders for missing paperwork.

In early March, U.S. Customs announced it would build an online refund system, no lawsuits necessary. Brown was relieved but now had to learn a customs portal he'd never used before. He listened to trade groups' webinars and kept thinking how easy it was to pay the tariffs in the first place. Now, it was like filing taxes: The government had all his data, but it was his responsibility to do the math and show the proof.

Forty days after the ruling, Brown was overwhelmed: "We're not equipped to deal with this. This wasn't my problem. And now you're telling me if I want my money back, figure it out. That sucks."

When the refund portal opened on April 20, some businesses applied in minutes. Brown was not among them. The next day, trade experts at the libertarian Cato Institute wrote that the refund process, not being automated or instant, risked shortchanging thousands of American companies: "Intentionally or not, the federal government will likely keep tens of billions of dollars it should have returned."

About a week into the process, U.S. Customs said it had rejected more than a third of filed claims for technical or data errors. As of April 26, the agency had accepted claims covering about a fifth of the shipments for which it owes refunds.

"It's money, and every dime matters for a small business," Brown says. He and Combs are still plugging away, though Brown often wonders if the effort is worth it. "I can't chase every fire," he says, "and right now, I feel like a firefighter."