Susan:

By the sounds of it Alternative Price list may be the answer for you. It allows alternative base price and discount levels to be created and assigned to customers. Special prices tends to be for industries that do one off pricing for a specific group of items for a specific customer.

Steve:

A. It does a lot more than just import special prices.
B. Few end users are comfortable using a read-write tool, let alone turing their staff loose with such a tool.