Items over €175, coming back from NY - penalty?

[RainyDay]

As Kellysayers has said, what are they going to do? Demand to see receipts? I travel over to New York every year and buy clothes which are similar to the ones I wear anyway. We're talking about the reality of the situation but you seem to wish to have some kind of lofty discussion about "silly excuses". If you've a jumper folded in your suitcase with no tags on it how does the discussion go with the Customs official? Your comparison with TV licences is ridiculous as there are technical issues there. "Where and when did you get this jumper?" "In Arnotts a couple of months ago""Can you prove this?" "Not really, and I'm not being funny but could you?""OK, move along"On the other hand if someone starts splutering and blushing and saying "Mmmm, ehhhh" then I'm sure they get hit.

OK then, you win. These professional Customs officers (who on a bad day will be dealing with drug dealers and professional cigarette smugglers) are going to get all flummoxed and intimidated when the shopper asks them to prove their position. Apologies for my obvious error.

I guess the Customs guys are far too dumb to have worked out that Abercrombie & Fitch isn't sold in Ireland at all (given that any shopper who has a teenage in their extended family is likely to have have their case full of A&F overpriced tat).

 

[John Rambo]

OK then, you win. These professional Customs officers (who on a bad day will be dealing with drug dealers and professional cigarette smugglers) are going to get all flummoxed and intimidated when the shopper asks them to prove their position. Apologies for my obvious error.

I guess the Customs guys are far too dumb to have worked out that Abercrombie & Fitch isn't sold in Ireland at all (given that any shopper who has a teenage in their extended family is likely to have have their case full of A&F overpriced tat).

To be honest I find your posts on this topic quite offensive...they add little to the subject.You can buy Abercrombie & Fitch in Ireland-there's a small place in the Powerscourt Centre which stocks a limited quantity. Plus, it could have been bought on a previous trip. What do you think will happen, that the customs officers will sniff the clothing to detect washing powder?And just for good measure, you throw in a jibe about A&F being overpriced tat. You're in the minority there. As a moderator I thought you'd have read the posting guidelines but evidently you haven't. You've added nothing to this discussion except attempts to cause confrontation with me. I suggest you examine the scenario being discussed from something other than a detached and theoretical viewpoint...do some travelling and talk to the customs officials and see how they behave.

 

[ubiquitous]

OK then, you win. These professional Customs officers (who on a bad day will be dealing with drug dealers and professional cigarette smugglers) are going to get all flummoxed and intimidated when the shopper asks them to prove their position.

The guy from the Revenue (who incidentally could not in any way be described as dumb) admitted as much on Morning Ireland about 20 minutes ago. I am probably misquoting him slightly but he said

- that it is impossible to verify whether all travellers are complying with the law,

- that it would not be acceptable for them to subject all travellers to indepth investigation on arrival.

- the Revenue experience is that the average traveller does not break the duty limits and they are happy at this

- because of this they are concentrating their efforts on people whom they suspect of bringing volumes of items home for resale.

I guess the Customs guys are far too dumb to have worked out that Abercrombie & Fitch isn't sold in Ireland at all.

Is this stuff available elsewhere in the EU? Can it be purchased online and delivered to Ireland duty-paid?

 

[DublinTexas]

So in summary the majority of posters here are saying because Revenue has no resources and it's "impossible to verify whether all travellers are complying with the law" that's it’s okay for us to commit a crime and smuggle!

The discussion about how and if Revenue is able to proof where one purchased the stuff is nice but beside the point:

S/he who is not declaring when bringing in goods from the US is breaking the law and cheating the revenue out of massive amounts of money (see earlier calculation of duty/vat due)!

The Last time I checked Ireland is part of the EU not the 53rd state of the USA and hence special rules apply for imports from the US!

How two faced is this. If I start declaring less income and use every loophole there is to pay less income tax everyone would call me a tax cheat and wants me to be trown in jail but going shopping in the USA without declaring imports is okay?

I get a lot of stuff send from the US via fedex and I always declare it and happyly pay my duty/vat because even with that cost it is usualy way cheaper than purchasing it here. Sure, that itself is crazy but it’s the fact. If I import thing than I made the decision to purchse it there because I still save money on it even with freight, duty and VAT. If that would not be the case I would buy it here.

 

[ubiquitous]

You are breaking the law and cheating the revenue out of massive amounts of money (see earlier calculation of duty/vat due)!
...

How two faced is this.

I take exception to these comments.

I am neither "breaking the law" nor am I "cheating the revenue out of massive amounts of money". Nor am I being "two faced".

I am simply telling you what the Revenue guy said on the radio.

If you have a gripe with this, take your complaint up with the Revenue or your TD. Don't blame me.

For the record, I haven't been in the US or anywhere else outside the EU in several years so your accusations are totally wrong...no matter how many exclamation marks you use to emphasise your point!

 

[DublinTexas]

I take exception to these comments.

I am neither "breaking the law" nor am I "cheating the revenue out of massive amounts of money". Nor am I being "two faced".

I am simply telling you what the Revenue guy said on the radio.

If you have a gripe with this, take your complaint up with the Revenue or your TD. Don't blame me.

For the record, I haven't been in the US or anywhere else outside the EU in several years so your accusations are totally wrong...no matter how many exclamation marks you use to emphasise your point!

Ubiquitous, I do appoligize if the previous posting might have been construed as to me accusing you of anything. I have edited the post to clarify this.

I quoted your statement followed by my opion which included references to the revenue statement and should have made a clearer break betwen my critism for the revenue statement you were kind enough to relay to us and the my personal opion about people bringing in thausends of $ worth of goods without declaring.

Never the less, I stick with my personal opinion about tax cheaters.

 

[Bronte]

I heard on the news today that if you are stupid enough to say bring 100 iphones in you will in all likelyhood get caught. The implication being that if you brought just one for personal use (with no tags/receipts/packing) the customs are not going to waste their time with that. The revenue guy, whom I did not hear, is not going to spell it out like that but I guess that's the way it works. They have bigger fish to fly then a few holiday makers bringing some clothes/gadgets to Ireland from the US. PS: I am making no comment on legality or illegality.

 

[orka]

Re: Items over €175, coming back from NY - penalty?

I get a lot of stuff send from the US via fedex and I always declare it and happyly pay my duty/vat

You’re making yourself out to be a paragon of virtue here but I’m curious - how do you ‘declare’ it? Fedex automatically (see numerous threads) add the duties, taxes and a service fee so there appears to be no saintly way of ‘declaring’ stuff – just as there is no way of avoiding it – unless the stuff is below a very low threshold value.

My personal experience is that if you go to the red channel and tell the customs officer that you have to declare personal shopping s/he usually asks you for the value and then tells you to go off without any charges.

Now, if this is true, how is this a fair system that whether you pay or not depends on the subjective decision of one customs official? Is the customs official aiding and abetting you in defrauding the revenue? You should have insisted that he let you pay what was due. It didn’t suddenly become ‘not due’ did it? The reality is that you did not pay tax that you admit was due to the revenue due to the ‘loophole’ of being fortunate enough to find a lenient/lax customs official. You should send the revenue a cheque today.

How two faced is this. If I start declaring less income and use every loophole there is to pay less income tax everyone would call me a tax cheat and wants me to be trown in jail but going shopping in the USA without declaring imports is okay?

So smiling sweetly at the customs official to ‘evade’ tax is okay but using a (technically legal) loophole is not? Going back to a point I made earlier, while yes you are technically correct that it is cheating the revenue of some income, there has to be a fairness aspect to any taxation system. I don’t mind paying the large amounts of income tax I pay because everyone (pretty much) pays their fair share relative to income. But with this, it appears to me that hardly anyone pays it (including DublinTexas by his/her own admission!). No-one apart from DublinTexas has come up with first-hand stories of ‘what happened when I went through the red channel and declared stuff’ or even ‘what happened when I went through the green channel with extra stuff and got pulled over’.

 

[John Rambo]

How two faced is this. If I start declaring less income and use every loophole there is to pay less income tax everyone would call me a tax cheat and wants me to be trown in jail

As that is not illegal in any way they would be wrong to say those things.

 

[Bronte]

Very good last point John Rambo. I too want to know all the loopholes as I wish to avoid paying any taxes I don't have to just like the top 10 (20?) earners in Ireland who pay zero (or next to nothing ) tax.

 

[ubiquitous]

I too want to know all the loopholes as I wish to avoid paying any taxes

Tax-incentive schemes: What’s available? [broken link removed]

Personally I would prefer to pay up to 41% tax & prsi on my earnings than to invest much of my money in the sort of "opportunties" listed in this link. It doesn't bother me that there are a few people out there with more money than sense who seem to be quite willing to buy large numbers of tax incentive properties that no-one else wants, just so that they can cut their tax bills to zero.

 

[Bronte]

I didn't mean things like that Ubi, in most of those schemes the tax value is negated by the cost of getting in. It's like those investment properties with a guaranted rental for the first 2 years. I mean legitimate ways of reducing one's tax bill.

 

[ubiquitous]

Re: Items over €175, coming back from NY - penalty?

Like it or not (and we're going way off-topic here) these are the schemes that high-rollers are using to reduce their tax bills to near zero. The other incentives such as pension provision, film investments etc (where, arguably, the tax value is also negated by the cost of getting in, as you put it) are generally well known. There is no great mystery about all this.

 

[Buckshee]

Ray Darcy had a revenue guy on his show this morning ( possibly the same one that was on Morning Ireland but I don't know). Far as I remember his name was Buckley and he was very high up in Revenue South East Division. He seemed to have a very sensible attitude to the whole thing which could best be summarised as follows.

They are not out to get the normal person who has spent a wad of cash on clothing for personal use and had a bit of a jolly up in New York / Boston into the bargain.

They are most certainly out to get the lone person with 9 suitcases walking through the green channel or the person who has 48 handbags ( they caught such a person ) or similar quantities of the new apple ifone ( Ditto) and which are quite obviously for resale and not personal use.

Also, just for the record he said the combined total charge for vat and duty for items over your personal limit was 30%. I know the 21% vat and 27% duty figure has been posted on here but thats what he said guys, 30%.

So essentially if I spend $1000 on clothing for myself when it is converted to euro at 1.42 approx less my allowance of €175 then i'll be paying approx €158 in taxes on my purchases. I think I could live with that just long as it doesn't take 2 hours to declare it and have ir processed.

 

[ubiquitous]

Also, just for the record he said the combined total charge for vat and duty for items over your personal limit was 30%. I know the 21% vat and 27% duty figure has been posted on here but thats what he said guys, 30%.

So essentially if I spend $1000 on clothing for myself when it is converted to euro at 1.42 approx less my allowance of €175 then i'll be paying approx €158 in taxes on my purchases. I think I could live with that just long as it doesn't take 2 hours to declare it and have ir processed.

Very interesting. So much fuss over so little - less indeed than many people will be paying in the Aer Rianta Car Park on their return...

 

[aircobra19]

Re: Items over €175, coming back from NY - penalty?

I caught something on the radio about them catching someone with 300 or 400 iPhones or something.

 

[MrKeane]

Re: Items over €175, coming back from NY - penalty?

I saw a clip on the TV news about this. So how many ordinary Joes go through all this with the intention of making a bottomline profit? Using ballpark figures its flights €400, hotel for 3/4 nights €300 and €300 for sundries - food and drink, airport parking etc. etc. Lets say €1000

I guess the Aer Lingus baggage allowance is about 40kgs (not a lot of clothes really)

If people want an ipod etc. its probably cheaper to bring it in via Ebay and pay the duty and tax.

It strikes me that most people do these trips for the novelty / craic / holiday / ****up etc. - not to make a bottom line profit. Most people will lose on this if they were in it for profit.

The cheap prices merely partly subsidise a pre christmas break IMO and the money paid to Aer Lingus and Airport staff offsets any loss in duty and excise.

 

[RainyDay]

To be honest I find your posts on this topic quite offensive...they add little to the subject.You can buy Abercrombie & Fitch in Ireland-there's a small place in the Powerscourt Centre which stocks a limited quantity. Plus, it could have been bought on a previous trip. What do you think will happen, that the customs officers will sniff the clothing to detect washing powder?And just for good measure, you throw in a jibe about A&F being overpriced tat. You're in the minority there. As a moderator I thought you'd have read the posting guidelines but evidently you haven't. You've added nothing to this discussion except attempts to cause confrontation with me. I suggest you examine the scenario being discussed from something other than a detached and theoretical viewpoint...do some travelling and talk to the customs officials and see how they behave.

If you have a problem with any of my posts, just click the red 'report post' triangle on the top right of any post, and it will be dealt with by the other moderators.

I'd suggest you read my posts, rather than putting words in my mouth. I never suggested that Customs Officers would be sniffing for Daz. I did suggest that assuming that you can brazen your way through customs with silly excuses could be a dangerous assumption. You and other posters are free to take my advice or leave it.

And you might like be sure of your facts before you buy more A&F tat in Powerscourt.

 

[MrKeane]

It reminds of those TV licence ads which just might make people realise that childish excuses don't work.

What makes you think childish excuses to evade paying the TV licence don't work - have you actually tried to use them?

The whole point of the ads is to scare people into thinking that they might get into big trouble for not paying their licence. From what I have seen in the media the biggest fine a court will hand out is probably €150, so if you get away with it for a year then you are quids in.

Once you have the right excuse you will get away with it when dealing with Gardai, customs, TV licence etc - you just have to have the neck to chance it.

I got a letter from the TV licence crowd recently, which "pretended" that they had called to the house a few days earlier. They had the date kind of scribbled out so I could not be sure when they had called and they had also ticked a box which said they had observed TV receiving equipment on the roof. Pity my aerial is indoors then and the satellite dish well hidden around the back.

So they are reduced to childish threats. It also said they will be back within 10 days - still no sign of them and it was around 2 weeks ago now.

 

[RainyDay]

Your day will come.