Really Right Stuff

[Jeremy Roussak]

It would be no more illegal than flying here and buying it yourself. Or, you could give the person the money as a personal gift. Then that person can buy you a gift with that money. In other words, no one will ever know because it would be quite impossible to prove any wrong doing. I went to Australia a number of years ago. At that time, they had no "Ping Eye 2" gold clubs, and everyone there wanted a set. I bought a used set in the US for 200US and sold them for 650 in Australia. Minus the 30% less for Aussie dollars, I paid for my plane ticket. No one batted an eye.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=171393\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You are confusing the ease of evading your legal obligations with the issue of their existence.

If you import an item which should be subject to import duty and/or VAT, you are obliged to declare the item and pay the taxes, unless you are personally carrying it into the country having been abroad yourself and the item's value is below the appropriate cutoff point.

If your scheme were legal, mail order companies which wanted to develop an international trade would simply set up local sister companies to whom donations of money could be made, which would then buy the items and deliver them with neither donor nor recipient being liable for tax. I suspect it wouldn't work for long.

Most of us drive faster than the speed limit allows us to drive. We don't usually get caught. That doesn't make what we're doing any more lawful.

I'm not being pious about it: like, I suspect, most other people, I have an ambivalent attitude towards minor and apparently victimless infractions of the law if they save me some money. But I have to accept that what I'm doing is not legal and that I will be punished if caught.

Jeremy

[dwdallam]

Yep, you are. Also note that corporations pass "laws" all the time that contribute to smaller businesses NOT being able to compete, which in itself should be against the law--see Microsoft anti-trust law suit. That's why so many peple rip off MS when they can because they see a company that has no competition and can do what ever it wants and charge whatever it wants. At least in the EU they saw through this MS bullshit and convicted them.

I knew I should have stated that if you do this on a personal basis, then there is no harm. It's mass bypassing of the import tariffs that are targeted by this type of law. If you make a copy of any music even for your own use, you are technically breaking the law. But I'm not going to let that infraction keep me from putting all my CDs on a 8GB sd card instead of carrying 140CDs  around in my car only to have some idiot steal them all. Some laws become absurd when you apply them to all peple all the time no matter what. If you need a specific piece of hardware to compete and it's out of price simply because of the world's obsession with F--up capitalist economic laws, then I saw you are more than justified in getting around them any way you can. After all, capitalism is solely based on self interest.

You are confusing the ease of evading your legal obligations with the issue of their existence.

If you import an item which should be subject to import duty and/or VAT, you are obliged to declare the item and pay the taxes, unless you are personally carrying it into the country having been abroad yourself and the item's value is below the appropriate cutoff point.

If your scheme were legal, mail order companies which wanted to develop an international trade would simply set up local sister companies to whom donations of money could be made, which would then buy the items and deliver them with neither donor nor recipient being liable for tax. I suspect it wouldn't work for long.

Most of us drive faster than the speed limit allows us to drive. We don't usually get caught. That doesn't make what we're doing any more lawful.

I'm not being pious about it: like, I suspect, most other people, I have an ambivalent attitude towards minor and apparently victimless infractions of the law if they save me some money. But I have to accept that what I'm doing is not legal and that I will be punished if caught.

Jeremy
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=171446\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

[sojournerphoto]

You are confusing the ease of evading your legal obligations with the issue of their existence.

If you import an item which should be subject to import duty and/or VAT, you are obliged to declare the item and pay the taxes, unless you are personally carrying it into the country having been abroad yourself and the item's value is below the appropriate cutoff point.

If your scheme were legal, mail order companies which wanted to develop an international trade would simply set up local sister companies to whom donations of money could be made, which would then buy the items and deliver them with neither donor nor recipient being liable for tax. I suspect it wouldn't work for long.

Most of us drive faster than the speed limit allows us to drive. We don't usually get caught. That doesn't make what we're doing any more lawful.

I'm not being pious about it: like, I suspect, most other people, I have an ambivalent attitude towards minor and apparently victimless infractions of the law if they save me some money. But I have to accept that what I'm doing is not legal and that I will be punished if caught.

Jeremy
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=171446\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Jeremy,

I agree with you - the law in the UK is quite clear, although many of the Hong Kong based suppliers seem to avoid their client paying import duty by describing goods as a gift...

Mike