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Porlestone
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 95
Location: Asia
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 Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2005 4:37 pm Post subject: Is Customs in Vietnam crazy? |
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| Wanting to send my dingy mountain bike from Vietnam to Taiwan when I plan to move sometime in the next year. Went in to a shipping company and asked all about it. Got the full explanation that the ship cost is $20, packing is $12, $20 for something else and $60 for customs! I showed the guy the bike how scratched and marked it is, they even asked me at first if "it's new or second hand" and I told them. This is not a high end bicycle by the way. Vietnam customs is going to charge $60 just to let me take out a used bicycle? |
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chipy66
Joined: 03 Jun 2005
Posts: 26
Location: HO- Town
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| Posted: Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:04 am Post subject: |
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vietnam customs tried to extort 2.5 million dong from me for a box of clothes and xmas gifts from my mom right before christmas. After several days of negotiation i got the "customs" price down to about 300,000 dong.
Be persistent, dont take their first price. |
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Proffeshnial Teachman
Joined: 10 Jan 2006
Posts: 60
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| Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2006 7:43 am Post subject: |
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I sent out a Christmas card. A simple card with a few ornamentations.
When it got home some desperately sad individual had ripped the envelope and card and stolen a small plastic star that was on the front of the card.
This might have happened at home, maybe the postman was curious........ 
.........or maybe like the upteen other times it was done by someone in Vietnam  |
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Porlestone
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 95
Location: Asia
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| Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:06 am Post subject: |
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Well, I made the above post a while back not realizing there would be more. A friend in the US sent me a pack of socks and pack of underwear in a package and it arrived here today. Went to the int'l post office pick up point in HCMC (across the street from that mall place with City Mart) and they tell me I need to pay a tax that equates to 74% of the value of what's inside.
I must pay in cash 74% of the value of the socks and underwear. They explained it's 50% tax plus 10% extra fee, that's 60%. Another 14% just appeared miraculously. I stayed there over an hour, played patient, talked to one foreigner getting their package, no help and no change. The Vietnam government apparently likes holding the package. I explained that a high tax for luxury goods would be understandable but for personal items sent by a friend the 50% + is not. They had no interest in even showing a sign of reduction of the money they were asking for. Not one, nothing worked. They also explained they would have no problems sending the package back to it's origin.
Did a web search and as one would think, all vietnamese websites are incredibly unclear about how much they tax things. Endless pages that look more like an arguement for defense and an explanation of every last item they can pick on. It became incredibly clear as to why there is not a long line of small foreign operations chipping in to set up their shops in this country. You can't even import underwear without trouble.
This page however gives some hint -- it says that the EU and Vietnam have made some agreements for basic fees on some items, namely clothing imported into Vietnam would be 20%. The US should be roughly the same.
Vietnam commits to reduce its customs duties for EU imports of textile and clothing products, progressively, to 20% for clothing, 12% for fabrics, 7% for yarns and 5 % for fibres in 2005 - or less than half the duties it applies at present (2003). It has also agreed to improve the management of the granting of licences for exports of the interest to EU textile and clothing industry
http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/issues/global/development/pr170203_en.htm |
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Gordon
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 5309
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:30 am Post subject: |
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| What is it like to send clothing out of Vietnam? Do they slap a big customs tax on it? I'll be in Vietnam in less than 2 weeks for a holiday and my wife plans to do some shopping. |
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VC
Joined: 11 Feb 2003
Posts: 35
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| Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 7:33 am Post subject: |
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| Porlestone wrote: |
Well, I made the above post a while back not realizing there would be more. A friend in the US sent me a pack of socks and pack of underwear in a package and it arrived here today. Went to the int'l post office pick up point in HCMC (across the street from that mall place with City Mart) and they tell me I need to pay a tax that equates to 74% of the value of what's inside.
I must pay in cash 74% of the value of the socks and underwear. They explained it's 50% tax plus 10% extra fee, that's 60%. Another 14% just appeared miraculously. I stayed there over an hour, played patient, talked to one foreigner getting their package, no help and no change. The Vietnam government apparently likes holding the package. I explained that a high tax for luxury goods would be understandable but for personal items sent by a friend the 50% + is not. They had no interest in even showing a sign of reduction of the money they were asking for. Not one, nothing worked. They also explained they would have no problems sending the package back to it's origin.
Did a web search and as one would think, all vietnamese websites are incredibly unclear about how much they tax things. Endless pages that look more like an arguement for defense and an explanation of every last item they can pick on. It became incredibly clear as to why there is not a long line of small foreign operations chipping in to set up their shops in this country. You can't even import underwear without trouble.
This page however gives some hint -- it says that the EU and Vietnam have made some agreements for basic fees on some items, namely clothing imported into Vietnam would be 20%. The US should be roughly the same.
Vietnam commits to reduce its customs duties for EU imports of textile and clothing products, progressively, to 20% for clothing, 12% for fabrics, 7% for yarns and 5 % for fibres in 2005 - or less than half the duties it applies at present (2003). It has also agreed to improve the management of the granting of licences for exports of the interest to EU textile and clothing industry
http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/issues/global/development/pr170203_en.htm |
Ridiculous! In my three years in Korea I never had to pay anything to customs to receive packages. While in Korea, I received packages from my family in the US. I ordered books and a DVD player from Hong Kong.
I recently had to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop. I lost Microsoft Word. When I purchased Microsoft Word, Microsoft sent a backup CD to my home in the US. I was thinking about having my family send it to me, but hesitate to do so because I don't know how much customs will try to extort from me when it arrives. The government here is the worst. They do nothing at all to help their own people (despite the poverty), they monitor people like big brother, and then they do things like this. |
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sigmoid
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 1276
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| Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:26 am Post subject: |
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| The government here is the worst. They do nothing at all to help their own people (despite the poverty), they monitor people like big brother, and then they do things like this. |
Yeah, but you can make 12 bucks an hour and eat that delicious Pho Bore every day, so it's worth it right? Plus, don't forget the added luxury of cheap DVD's.  |
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Porlestone
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 95
Location: Asia
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| Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 11:50 am Post subject: |
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Finally paid the damn tax. Give me my damn underwear and Happy Birthday card, idiots! Actually it was 3 taxes: a 50% tax and two other fees. WTO? Not worthy. Oh yah, I printed out a copy of that article at above url, they read it and replied "yah, so?"
The single CD thing might work. I did an online study a while back and the school sent over a few of their educational CDs to my address here in hcmc. Those however did pass through without tax. But then again they weren't as commercial as a CD that would say "Microsoft Corp" on it. Possibility it might work. |
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