Tax on Imports

[Niko]

Shipping your Favourite Vitamins and Foodstuffs

If any teachers or students are thinking to have their favourite vitamins or food items sent onto them, then think again! Today I received an unpleasant surprise, and I'm sure other English teachers have experienced the same.

• Huge tax bills AND / OR
• Confiscated items

Not only are vitamins and food items heavy and costly to send, but you will also be lumped with huge tax bills on receiving the items. I'm teaching English in Japan and recently had vitamins sent to me. Upon delivery, I was asked to pay an added 12.5% on the value of the items. I definitely wasn't a happy camper!

One word of advice - if you still want things shipped to you, have the value of the items written on the outside of the box to be much cheaper than their actual worth. That way, you will pay less tax. The only catch though, would be insurance on missing items. If your items are insured, then you wont be able to replace them with the insurance money as you grossly undervalued the item's worth.

Catch 22 situation I suppose.

Guy Campbell
(English Teacher - Tokyo, Japan)

[Tutor]

Instead of a win-win situation this is a lose-lose situation. I am bit happy that atleast in America I get mostly all the food stuffs and medicines easily available or can even get them without increasing the cost much.