Correct. He’ll get the refund the day after a clerk reviews the transactions and clicks the refund button. The “Please allow N–M weeks…” verbiage you find in many types of contracts is just the other party giving themselves time to conduct that manual review. It should never be taken as an estimate of how long the other party thinks it will actually take.

Exactly - I suspect there are internal checks and procedures to prevent scams involving overpayment and immediate refund.

Or just as simple as “everything has to settle before we send a check” so you can’t use the US Treasury as part of a check cashing scam.