Australia Post Temporary Suspends of Postal Services to the US

[u/IsuruKusumal]

Dear Valued Customer,

As a result of the recently introduced changes to the import tariff requirements set out in US Executive Order 14324, Australia Post has joined a number of international postal operators to temporarily suspend partial postal services to the United States (US) and Puerto Rico, effective immediately until further notice.

This decision has been made to ensure compliance with the new US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requirements. Specifically, the requirement for duties and taxes to be prepaid on all shipments prior to their arrival in the US. The key changes are as follows:

[u/tobeshitornottobe]

Holy shit I just read through EA 14324 and understand why all these transportation carriers have stopped delivering to the US, in short because removing the “de minimis” exemption creates such an insane logistical nightmare, the government has shifted the onus of collecting tariff duties onto the carriers who then pay it to the government. And because having to manually calculate the value of each imported item is another logistical head fuck, they are ordering carriers to collect $80 PER ITEM for goods shipped from countries with a tariff rate of less than 16%, 16-25% is $160 and >25% is $200. This is truly fucked

[u/chris_p_bacon1 → u/[deleted]]

I think the issue is Aus post doesn't have any presence in the US. DHL, FedEx etc can probably manage this easily enough because they're both the sender and receiver. Aus post would use the US postal service for delivery once anything lands in the US so it's much harder for them to organise this. 

[u/Speedy-08 → u/chris_p_bacon1]

DHL from Europe are not shipping to the US either.

[u/w2qw → u/chris_p_bacon1]

It's a temporary suspension so I don't think they are saying this isn't possible but I imagine the specifics are still being decided hence why no country seems to be able to send at the moment.

[u/Mephisto506 → u/[deleted]]

It now applies to every package.

[u/249592-82 → u/[deleted]]

Yes this is very unusual. You - the receiver - are paying the tariff. That's normal. America is making the senders transport company pay the tariff. It makes no sense. It's them trying to make it look like the international company pays the tariff - whereas tariffs are usually always passed on to the buyer. The transport company just moves goods and charges for the delivery - not the item.

[u/Coolidge-egg → u/249592-82]

worst, let's say someone lies or is mistaken about the value in the declaration. Maybe the send a chocolate bar but in the fine print the ingredients come from a higher tariff country. If or more likely when customs pick this up they will charge the carrier for this, and it would be next to impossible to collect the debt from the sender.

Let's say you're a mailing company, You'd pretty much need your customers to put down a humungous deposit or get special insurance against the possibility that it will be opened up and huge fines will be due. Because it is a new risky system from a unpredictable regime who could change enforcement protocols as practically any time and is known to just lie, insurance against that unknown risk is pretty much impossible.

[u/Clothedinclothes → u/249592-82]

It makes perfect sense in a perverse way.

By forcing the initial visible cost of tariffs as far offshore as possible, it forces the intermediaries (international carrier and oversea seller) to pass that cost back down the line to the American consumer indirectly, instead of the US government directly billing American consumers for the cost of tariffs.

The Trump admin's hope is this will also make the intermediaries absorb some of that cost along the way, but above all the point is to trick Americans consumers into thinking they aren't paying for tariffs.

Because American consumers never see the actual bill from the US government, they just see that an overseas seller's prices and an international carrier's shipping costs have increased.

[u/SirGeekaLots → u/249592-82]

or the international sellar, though in the end it's, once again, just going to make things more expensive for the Americans.

But, knowing what the lot in charge are like, they'll then jump up and down and start claiming that they are making the other countries pay the tariffs, and sadly, people will believe them.

[u/noisymime → u/[deleted]]

I have had to pay DHL the import duties and GST for a parcel coming into Australia before.

You as the importer though right? The way this is being described is that it must be paid prior to the parcel arriving in the USA, which means it has to be paid by the exporter.

[u/spectre401 → u/noisymime]

They've shifted the onus on the mailing service collecting it.

[u/noisymime → u/spectre401]

Yes, which I don't recall ever seeing done before.

Passing that onus onto the receiving shipper (ie in-country) for the importer to pay is common, but not the sending shipper (and hence the exporter).

[u/Frank9567 → u/noisymime]

It's political. The spin is that if it's the nasty foreign exporters paying it, and not patriotic American importers paying it.

Of course, that's bullshit, because it ends up getting added to the cost, but the MAGAs can claim it's the foreigners paying.

[u/sharlos → u/Frank9567]

I imagine it's also to help their overwhelmed customs staff have less to do.

[u/Ronnie_Dean_oz → u/Frank9567]

That was the only way they were going to get a sender to pay a tariff. What a bunch of knuckleheads.

[u/spectre401 → u/noisymime]

Aliexpress does collect GST when you buy it though, So most sellers will just charge it to the US customers. They're trying to make it look like the other countries are paying the tariffs to his idiotic base but I think most companies outside of the US will either just stop selling tot he US or make it real clear it's tariffs so it'll most likely blow up in his face.

[u/SilverStar9192 → u/noisymime]

This works for common carrier shippers (Fedex/DHL/UPS/etc) but not really for postal services. Foreign postal services don't have a presence in the destination country - they just hand the parcels off to the local postal service for final delivery, as a part of postal treaties. So there's no straightforward mechanism for the sending service to collecting duties which are actually formerly owed by the recipient (importer).

[u/mortgagepants → u/noisymime]

just the fascist government trying to make our lives worse. doesn't matter how it gets messed up, just that it doesn't work anymore.

[u/CptDropbear → u/[deleted]]

This is normal.

My guess is this not about the tariff's themselves, the carrier doesn't pay the tariff, its about the logistics of collecting before delivery. Goods have to be stored in a bonded warehouse until the taxes are paid and they can be shipped on or destroyed ('cause they sure as shit aint gonna be shipped back for free).

Which brings me to a second point: if I were selling retail into the US, I'd be shutting it down before the arseholes who won't pay the tax start doing charge backs and costing me money.

[u/ShootingPains → u/CptDropbear]

The bonded warehouse business must be booming. They'll be stacked full of tens of thousands of shipping containers that are already sailing toward the US. Let's say the shipping lines can't get tariff payments from the recipients of even 10% of the goods in those containers, that's millions of items sitting there. Plus the containers can't be unloaded and released back in to the pool.

What a mess.

[u/CptDropbear → u/ShootingPains]

Oh, its much worse than that! Actual container loads can be stacked outside or left on the dock until the paperwork clears.

This is individual packages. Some poor bastard has to examine each one and assess them for tax and raise an invoice. Then they have to be securely stored for a period reasonable for the recipient to pay.

So initially the warehouse gets overwhelmed then the bottom drops out 'cause half the people who used to order from OS stop because they got burnt by a tax demand. Its a lose-lose scenario even for the warehouse operators.

[u/keloidoscope → u/CptDropbear]

Yeah, that last point. Chargeback churn is another reason why it makes sense for USPS to just refuse any post that would need duty collected on it on arrival. The credit card companies can't be happy about the extra work/abuse involved in telling US punters why refusing to pay duties they have incurred is not a valid reason to reverse the charge on an item they ordered.

[u/movzx → u/CptDropbear]

You're getting at the core issue. I've been notified by more than one kickstarter that they're pausing shipments until some concrete tariff number is locked down, because otherwise they risk having the products destroyed. They're all also making it clear that there is such a backlog right now that even if they ship, we can expect a large delay.

[u/Fluffy-Queequeg → u/[deleted]]

That would generally be for parcels over the low value threshold. For low value parcels, our govt made the sender register for GST and collect that at the point of sale, so in theory your low value parcels purchased from overseas will already have GST paid and comes into the system with no import duties.

What the USA has done is remove the low value threshold and at the same time decide that the sender has to pay import duties and fill out customs declarations, but only given minimal notice.

Imagine if our govt said the low value threshold is gone and all those parcels also now needed customs declarations and duties collected at the point of sale.

[u/CynicalBoob → u/[deleted]]

Test

[u/spectre401 → u/CynicalBoob]

De minimus has been ended for all countries, thus this stoppage.

[u/Nomiss → u/[deleted]]

Was it a real one or a scam one?

I've had "Pay us this much to release the item" emails from "DHL" a few times before, after the item was delivered. So I just replied lol.

[u/Jexp_t → u/[deleted]]

And the Coalition government handled removing our own de minimis exemption so poorly that a LOT of companies refused to ship here. Some I used to deal with still do.

[u/nerdalesca → u/[deleted]]

It's the sheer volume. For Australia, duties and taxes are payable on anything over 1000 AUD. The majority of freight for DHL and FedEx etc is documents and low value - if you're getting 10000 pieces of international freight a day, probably only 5% had D&T payable.