Businesses from Wall Street to main street are struggling to comply with President Donald Trump’s byzantine tariff regime, driving up costs and counteracting, for some, the benefits of the corporate tax cuts Republicans passed earlier this year.

Trump has ripped up the U.S. tariff code over the past year, replacing a decades-old system that imposed the same tariffs on imports from all but a few countries with a vastly more complicated system of many different tariff rates depending on the origin of imported goods.

To give an example, an industrial product that faced a mostly uniform 5 percent tariff rate in the past could now be taxed at 15 percent if it comes from the EU or Japan, 20 percent from Norway and many African countries, 24 to 25 percent from countries in Southeast Asia and upwards of 50 percent from India, Brazil or China.

“This has been an exhausting year, I’d say, for most CEOs in the country,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, an industry group whose 1,300 member companies include major brands like Amazon, Walmart and AMD, as well as many small businesses and startups. “The level of executive time that’s been put in this has been enormous. So instead of focusing on innovation, they’re focusing on how they deal with the tariffs.”

Upping the pressure, the Justice Department has announced that it intends to make the prosecution of customs fraud one of its top priorities.

The proliferation of trade regulations and threat of intensified enforcement has driven many companies to beef up their staff and spend what could add up to tens of millions of dollars to ensure they are not running afoul of Trump’s requirements.

The time and expense involved, combined with the tens of billions of dollars in higher tariffs that companies are paying each month to import goods, amount to a massive burden that is weighing down industries traditionally reliant on imported products. And it’s denting, for some, the impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts that companies will receive over the next decade via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by the White House.

“Every CEO survey says this is their biggest issue,” said Shapiro.

A recent survey by KPMG, a professional services firm, found 89 percent of CEOs said they expect tariffs to significantly impact their business’ performance and operations over the next three years, with 86 percent saying they expect to respond by increasing prices for their goods and services as needed.

Maytee Pereira, managing director for customs and international trade at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, another professional services firm, has seen a similar trend. “Many of our clients have been spending easily 30 to 60 percent of their time having tariff conversations across the organization,” Pereira said.

That’s forced CEOs to get involved in import-sourcing decisions to an unprecedented degree and intensified competition for personnel trained in customs matters.

“There’s a real dearth of trade professionals,” Pereira said. “There isn’t a day that I don’t speak to a client who has lost people from their trade teams, because there is this renewed need for individuals with those resources, with those skill sets.”

But the impact goes far beyond a strain on personnel into reducing the amount of money that companies are willing to spend on purchasing new capital equipment or making other investments to boost their long-term growth.

“People are saying they can’t put money into R&D,” said one industry official, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of antagonizing the Trump administration. “They can’t put money into siting new factories in the United States. They don’t have the certainty they need to make decisions.”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. However, the administration has previously defended tariffs as key to boosting domestic manufacturing, along with their overall economic agenda of tax cuts and reduced regulation.

They’ve also touted commitments from companies and other countries for massive new investments in the U.S. in order to avoid tariffs, although they’ve acknowledged it will take time for the benefits to reach workers and consumers.

“Look, I would have loved to be able to snap my fingers, have these facilities going. It takes time,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview this week on Fox News. “I think 2026 is going to be a blockbuster year.”

For some companies, however, any benefit they’ve received from Trump’s push to lower taxes and reduce regulations has been substantially eroded by the new burden of complying with his complicated tariff system, said a second industry official, who was also granted anonymity for the same reason.

“It is incredibly complex,” that second industry official said. “And it keeps changing, too.”

Matthew Aleshire, director of the Milken Institute’s Geo-Economics Initiative, said he did not know of any studies yet that estimate the overall cost, both in time and money, for American businesses to comply with Trump’s new trade regulations. But it appears substantial.

“I think for some firms and investors, it may be on par with the challenges experienced in the early days of Covid. For others, maybe a little less so. And for others, it may be even more complex. But it’s absolutely eating up or taking a lot of time and bandwidth,” Aleshire said.

The nonpartisan think tank’s new report, “Unintended Consequences: Trade and Supply Chain Leaders Respond to Recent Turmoil,” is the first in a new series exploring how companies are navigating the evolving trade landscape, he said.

One of the main findings is that it has become very difficult for companies to make decisions, “given the high degree of uncertainty” around tariff policy, Aleshire said.

Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs — imposed on most countries under a 1977 emergency powers act that is now being challenged in court — start at a baseline level of 10 percent that applies to roughly 100 trading partners. He’s set higher rates, ranging from 15 to 41 percent, on nearly 100 others, including the 27-member European Union. Those duties stack on top of the longstanding U.S. “most-favored nation” tariffs.

Two notable exceptions are the EU and Japan, which received special treatment in their deals with Trump.

Companies also could get hit with a 40 percent penalty tariff if the Trump administration determines an item from a high-tariffed country has been illegally shipped through a third country — or assembled there — to obtain a lower tariff rate. However, businesses are still waiting for more details on how that so-called transshipment provision, which the Trump administration outlined in a summer executive order, will work.

The president also has hit China, Canada and Mexico with a separate set of tariffs under the 1977 emergency law to pressure those countries to do more to stop shipments of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from entering the United States.

Imports from Canada and Mexico are exempt from the fentanyl duties, however, if they comply with the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade pact Trump brokered in his first term. That has spared most goods the U.S. imports from its North American neighbors, but also has forced many more companies to spend time filling out paperwork to document their compliance.

Trump’s increasingly baroque tariff regime also includes the “national security” duties he has imposed on steel, aluminum, autos, auto parts, copper, lumber, furniture and heavy trucks under a separate trade law.

But the administration has provided a partial exemption for the 25 percent tariffs he has imposed on autos and auto parts, and has struck deals with the EU, Japan and South Korea reducing the tariff on their autos to 15 percent.

In contrast, Trump has taken a hard line against exemptions from his 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, and recently expanded the duties to cover more than 400 “derivative” products, such as chemicals, plastics and furniture, that contain some amount of steel and aluminum or are shipped in steel and aluminum containers.

And the administration is not stopping there, putting out a request in September for further items it can add to the steel and aluminum tariffs.

“This is requiring companies that do not even produce steel and aluminum products to keep track of and report what might be in the products that they’re importing, and it’s just gotten incredibly complicated,” one of the industry officials granted anonymity said.

That’s because companies need to precisely document the amount of steel or aluminum used in a product to qualify for a tariff rate below 50 percent.

“Any wrong step, like any incorrect information, or even delay in providing the information, risks the 50 percent tariff value on the entire product, not just on the metal. So the consequence is really high if you don’t get it right,” the industry official said.

The administration has also signaled plans to similarly expand tariffs for other products, such as copper.

And the still unknown outcomes of ongoing trade investigations that could lead to additional tariffs on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, polysilicon, unmanned aircraft systems, wind turbines, medical products and robotics and industrial machinery continue to make it difficult for many companies to plan for the future.

Small business owners say they feel particularly overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the various tariff rules and rates.

“We are no longer investing into product innovation, we’re not investing into new hires, we’re not investing into growth. We’re just spending our money trying to stay afloat through this,” said Cassie Abel, founder and CEO of Wild Rye, an Idaho company which sells outdoor clothing for women, during a virtual press conference with a coalition of other small business owners critical of the tariffs.

Company employees have also “spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours counter-sourcing product, pausing production, restarting production, rushing production, running price analysis, cost analysis, shipping analysis,” Abel said. “I spent zero minutes on tariffs before this administration.”

In one sign of the duress small businesses are facing, they have led the charge in the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose both the reciprocal and the fentanyl-related tariffs.

Crutchfield Corp., a family-owned electronics retailer based in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the litigants in the case, in which the owners detailed its difficulties in coping with Trump’s erratic tariff actions.

“If tariffs can be imposed, increased, decreased, suspended or altered … through the changing whim of a single person, then Crutchfield cannot plan for the short term, let alone the long run,” the company wrote in its brief, asking “the Court to quell the chaos.”