Foiled by Customs

When we lived in America, we were members of the R.E.I. co-op. It was one of our favourite places to shop. We miss R.E.I. We have not found New Zealand's version of R.E.I., Kathmandu, to be a satisfactory substitute.

So as members of R.E.I., we get dividends. Our dividend last year was over $200. We were very excited to spend our free money on R.E.I. goodies. We ordered heaps of stuff online, exceeding our dividend budget a tiny bit...

Of course, R.E.I. does not ship to New Zealand. (No one ships to New Zealand.) Lucky for us, my little sister has a part-time job at R.E.I. in Chicago. So we had our stuff shipped to her store, and arranged for her to ship the goodies to us. She shipped it about 5 weeks ago. We waited anxiously for our box to arrive.

We waited. We waited.

Then last week we got this letter in the post from New Zealand Customs Service:

"On 01 September 2010 we wrote to you concerning a parcel or packet sent to you from overseas that has been processed by New Zealand Customs Service. The item is still being held by New Zealand Post pending Customs release."

What?! We had not received any letter.

I called the phone number on the letter. I said who I was and that I had this letter. Oddly enough, the man who answered the phone said, "Wow, you got that letter already? I just sent that to you yesterday..." Only in New Zealand can you call a government office and be recognised by the person on the other end of the phone. Seriously, when does that ever happen?

Anyway, the nice Customs Official explained that the 1st September letter was accidentally sent to the wrong address. So he sent us the second letter. It turned out, we owed money.

$114.35! That's an import duty, GST on the import duty, an import transaction fee, GST on the import transaction fee, a biosecurity levy, and (you guessed it) GST on the biosecurity levy. $114.35!!! How can this be??

Here's how it can be: When shipping our R.E.I. goodies, my sister ticked the "merchandise" box instead of the "gift" box on the customs form. Apparently, you pay import duties on merchandise, but not on gifts. Kind of a pisser, really. Adding insult to injury, we were charged duty fees not only on the value of the goods shipped (declared as US$200), but also on the cost to ship those goods (US$57.60). Something about that just doesn't seem right. But we were not about to fight The Man, even a nice one who remembered sending us a letter.