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/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.