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Re: Claiming customs marked as gift
Well for reimbursement usually you would just mail back the slip they give you off the customs form when you go to pay it off. Honestly though customs charges are not worth fighting because there really is no way to fight these people. I tried doing it a couple of times and unless the charges seem really outrageous (as far beyond GST & PST) they will deny it every time.
It also does not matter if it's declared as a gift or not, in reality it has nothing to do with a package getting hit up for charges or not. From what I hear, and this is on very good authority from both Canada Post and Customs, is that all they look at is the declared value of the package. I don't know what the exact "official" amount that is exempt, like rid pointed out there site says $60 but I find this number will vary considerably with every person you talk to. For example I've heard from customs directly $60 and $35, and also a couple of times that toys should be exempt completely from charges. At any rate the magic mark I've been told is $25 CAD. Anything over this apparently is fair game, but 99.9% of the time anything declared $25 or under is automatically passed over, wile anything above is just picked out at random (again gift or no gift). It will also vary on were you live as people in the West seem to get hit up a heck of a lot more then people in the East.
Anyway the short version is if your hit up you just have to bite the bullet, but the best advice is get the person on the other end to mark it under $25 as from what people have told me and from experience this is the closest way of beating the system.
Last edited by soundwaveCA; 09-06-2007 at 01:41 AM.
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