Unless you live in a van down by the river and have never, and don't plan on ever using electricity, a real toilet, roads, GPS, police (and this doesn't just include calling the police, but the fact that you aren't pillaged by hoards of bandits every night), hospital, ambulance, public transit, and any other thing that your taxes pay for even if you are dying or in immense pain, you should be happy about paying taxes.

Crap argument. Nobody is advocating the eliminating of taxes. The issue at hand is an outright obscene tax just for importing.

Everyone (in the free world) has the right to disagree with what governments decree by law, regulation, taxes, duties, fees & etc. But I'm with dsavitsk on this issue. You can disagree without breaking the law. You can protest, fight for change or refuse to buy/import/export. When you disobey you become anarchists, liars, cheats, frauds, tieives, & etc. You may believe "everyone does it". I don't

No amount of posturing, debate or argument will cause either side to change their view. Jim, you're right. We'll have to agree to disagree.

I agree to that, I for one will be fighting with a soldering iron in my hand. Though I'd rather have the tax money stay in the manufacturers country so it can promote the manufacturer I'm buying from. Not the country that could not provide me with the goods I'm after.

And yeah, in this case with Iceland, I don't think that duties are really applicable. Maybe guys just saved the customs some paperwork.

Unless you live in a van down by the river and have never, and don't plan on ever using electricity, a real toilet, roads, GPS, police (and this doesn't just include calling the police, but the fact that you aren't pillaged by hoards of bandits every night), hospital, ambulance, public transit, and any other thing that your taxes pay for even if you are dying or in immense pain, you should be happy about paying taxes.

Well if you put it that way we should all be begging to have our taxes raised

Fair enough, but a lot of folks see it in a much more black and white way than that.

Well if you put it that way we should all be begging to have our taxes raised

I think we should be begging for certain people to have their taxes raised....

Edited October 26, 201114 yr by rhythmdevils

EDIT: If you guys could post a link to whatever law purportedly was violated, I would be interested.

I can't speak to the Icelandic law. I was simply reacting to the statement suggesting that duties were lower than they should have been due to "creativity in shipping." If I overreacted to that statement, then it is my mistake.

As for filling out the customs form incorrectly, if that os indeed what happened, how about http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1001.html

Ah, I wasn't considering the customs form on the US end. Off to read US Customs law I go!

Edit: I really don't want to pack for this trip tomorrow...

EDIT: If you guys could post a link to whatever law purportedly was violated, I would be interested.

EDITEDIT: As an example, Chapter IV, Article 6, para 6 of Iceland's Customs Law (I'll post a link in a bit) permits the duty free importation of goods returned from abroad for just about any reason provided that proof is available that the goods were exported from Iceland. Unclear as to whether this means the goods must have been manufactured in Iceland, but there are other provisions that are helpful, too.

What a strange turn this evening took. Now reading Iceland Customs tariff and Tax Law

As long as no icelandic customs have been paid for the object on a former occasion, duties must be paid on import. If these duties are not paid, that's what's called smuggling. Most countries have laws against this.

That's how I read it anyway, but I've never studied law, so who knows.

25% commodity tax on sound reproduction equipment etc. is the same as here.

To be completely frank I do not understand the nagging about having to pay duties. If you're able to pay $10k for a DAC you should be able to handle the duties.

OK, just to be clear I was not making a general statement about import duties, tariffs or the price of cakes in Iceland. I was simply dumbfounded as to how, with the information in the original post, someone could call it fraudelent and then go on to equate it with white collar crime, even if it does involve the Stax mafia. And also for the record we pay a shitload of taxes as do most other middle-class Americans. So please stop with all of the red herrings and other smelly fish.

Edited October 26, 201114 yr by morphsci

To be completely frank I do not understand the nagging about having to pay duties. If you're able to pay $10k for a DAC you should be able to handle the duties.

It's not the fact that one can or cannot afford it. It's the fact that the tax is so high in many areas, and the country collecting the tax did nothing to earn it. I agree with RudeWolf, the country that the company resides in is the country that should collect any taxes on the sale (I have the same opinion about sales tax in the US). Yes, it leads to a very long discussion about globalism, maintaining international commerce competitiveness, and a plethora of other topics, but I hope that you understand my underlying perspective: an egregious tax on imports only hurts the consumer living in that country - it limits choice. I thought that was what globalism was all about...

As an aside: though this is wildly off topic, I find discussions like this very fascinating.

Edited October 26, 201114 yr by roadtonowhere08

It's a pain in the ass to ship stuff ex-US.

Unless you live in a van down by the river and have never, and don't plan on ever using electricity, a real toilet, roads, GPS, police (and this doesn't just include calling the police, but the fact that you aren't pillaged by hoards of bandits every night), hospital, ambulance, public transit, and any other thing that your taxes pay for even if you are dying or in immense pain, you should be happy about paying taxes.

Congratulations, you're officially a sanctimonious prick.

Is that like Headphoneus Supremus on Head-fi?

I think we should be begging for certain people to have their taxes raised....

Ok, then why don't we start with the 47% of adult Americans who don't pay any taxes at all...

Maybe some of the "undocumented workers" could be asked to pay a bit of tax on the income they earn while illegally in the US, and while we're at it, perhaps they should be granted some jail time rather than asylum.

This thread sucks.

Where exactly is the line between fraud that is fraud, and fraud that you don't think is fraud? Simply calling my argument ludicrous does not refute it.

Doug, the line is the same line that most likely has you believing you don't commit criminal acts all the time. Speeding is a crime, and yet most of us do it on a daily basis with little to no thought.

Your "fraud is fraud" argument is weak, and I'm one of the guys who usually quietly supports you on here.

So here is how this actually went down.

Remember all those T2 chassis i shipped outside the USA last year...

At the time the size of the box (girth plus height) was less than the maximum

size and was less than the maximum weight. So it shipped USPS priority

mail, about $215 to europe.

Well times have changed and the USPS is just about bankrupt. So the size

and weight have shrunk so that if i had to ship the T2 chassis now, it would

just barely meet the requirements, and for next year, NO WAY.

So there were 2 choices to ship the beast to iceland. Package size is 24 x 24 x 7 inches.

and it weighs 40 lbs. So i could not ship the thing priority.

So option 1 was fedex direct, the shipping cost was $515. (slowest way possible)

option 2 was USPS global express mail. Which it turns out is actually also fedex but

USPS gets a great deal because they are moving everything over to fedex. So it

was $316. Fine. Birgir told me how much to insure it for. But when i got to the

post office, i ran into this fucking asshole who i hate and who is incompetent.

But he was the only one at the counter at the time. Rash of shit later, and an inch

of customs forms later, finally got to the computer, and there was an extremely

limited dropdown list of available contents. He refused to actually type in something

saying i would get it back. There was no "amplifier" or "digital audio converter" or

anything like that. And the only thing in the list that was close was "audio tapes"

So i wrote "audio tapes device" on the customs forms, and off it went.

Part 2 of this is that fedex asseses the duty for the receiving country, saving their

inspectors the time and trouble that they have to go thru for priority mail.

So the duty charge was $80 which isn't even right on insurance of $220.

With a shipping cost of $316.

What the thing is actually worth is for the buyer to determine.

And none of this is my fault

Its all seriously fucked up.

Edited October 26, 201114 yr by kevin gilmore

My original opinion of this transaction still stands with the clarification.

Edited October 26, 201114 yr by morphsci

Doug, the line is the same line that most likely has you believing you don't commit criminal acts all the time. Speeding is a crime, and yet most of us do it on a daily basis with little to no thought.

Agreed. Doesn't alter my previous opinion. I'm okay with not being perfect.

Thanks for your update Kevin. Analogy applied to the wrong situation and I was wrong.

Congratulations, you're officially a sanctimonious prick.

Is that like Headphoneus Supremus on Head-fi?

Looks like a good custom title to me!

But when i got to the post office, i ran into this fucking asshole who i hate and who is incompetent.

But he was the only one at the counter at the time. Rash of shit later, and an inch

of customs forms later, finally got to the computer, and there was an extremely

limited dropdown list of available contents. He refused to actually type in something

saying i would get it back. There was no "amplifier" or "digital audio converter" or

anything like that. And the only thing in the list that was close was "audio tapes"

So i wrote "audio tapes device" on the customs forms, and off it went.

And I thought we only had jobs-worth bureaucrats in the UK!

Can you really commit fraud when the person (in this case the USPS) didn't know (and probably will never know) he/it was being defrauded? And I doubt there is enough here to make this a crime.

Can we all get back to more "meehh" impressions?

Can we all get back to more "meehh" impressions?

Who made you the boss?

USPS told me a double-boxed B22 was too big to ship to Iceland.

I thought that was funny.

Can you really commit fraud when the person (in this case the USPS) didn't know (and probably will never know) he/it was being defrauded? And I doubt there is enough here to make this a crime.

As noted in the paragraph Doug linked to, the act must be done 'willfully'. So if the jerk behind the counter won't allow you to do things according to regulations, you're probably not to blame.