The question is, how do you legally know that they passed all that cost on to the customers? After all, customers did not pay the import fees directly. It will be a hard case to make.

Tariffs were announced which applied to PlayStation products. The prices consumers had to pay for these products increased at the same time. It is not hard to know that the price increase is related to the tariff. Also, I cannot find it right now but I think Sony even publicly blamed price increases on tariffs.

Now personally, I strongly believe businesses abused the announcement of tariffs and the general person being a total idiot when it comes to knowing what tariffs do in order to increase the and consumer price by MORE than what the tariff added at point of entry. I believe this ALSO should be illegal as price gouging.

Also, a majority of Americans voted to introduce tariffs. It was a big part of Trump's campaign from the start. The reason Sony received this money in the first place was because of errors made by the American government, making the tariffs illegal. It was the US government that is responsible for this money, not Sony.

Voting habits or trends are entirely irrelevant to the conversation. I dont care about politics, nor is it part of the issue. The government added a tariff on an imported good. The business passed the cost to the consumer instead of paying it themselves. If the business consumed the cost themselves, they would legally be entitled to the refunded money; they were the ones that paid it. But since they passed the price off to the consumer (or distributor, depending on the sale endpoint if they weren't making a direct to consumer sale), they are not legally entitled to any of it. Therefore if they keep the money instead of refunding it, that should be legally considered theft. Like when an employer makes a payroll mistake and accidentally underpair an employee, they cannot keep that money they have to pay it to the employee it belongs to.

It should be the responsibility of the government to enforce that the money gets to its legal owner. However, because Sony has all the sales records related to the refunded money, it is Sony's responsibility to process the refunds to the effected sales. In the case of a distributor (like Target or Amazon), once they receieve the refunds for the tariffs those distributors now have the responsibility to use their own sales records to issue refunds to the consumers that paid it, unless the distributor consumed the tariff cost themselves.

Should these efforts incur extra cost (IE, the financial employees have to work more hours than they are already on payroll for), then those additional costs should be the government's responsibility to pay to the business. If there is no extra cost, the business isnt entitled to extra money. They already pay employees to handle financial records for the business, so unless they need to be staying overtime and working very long hours, this would already be part of their regular job responsibilities.

Perhaps this explains what I said SHOULD happen a bit better. I am sure that isnt what actually will happen and the business is just going to fight to keep the money. Greed always wins in this world.