I already contacted @funmonkey54 about this subject and received quick reply saying he won’t be hosting the event this year.
As many of you know European import charge policies have changed since last Secret Santa and nowadays even gifted parcels might require declaring. For example I just visited Finnish Customs website and here’s a small quote about gifted items:
" Declare the gift consignment in the Import Declaration Service for private persons. Choose that you wish to declare a gift sent by a private person.
For the declaration, you’ll need to know the content and value of the gift, and you’ll need the notice of arrival. "
My question is how are you planning to solve this problem while making new assignments? The way I see things is many users need to know item value + shipping value if they want to receive their letters/packages in timely manner. I feel it’s better to discuss about this really early so it doesn’t come as a nasty surprise to anyone.
It would be an option whether you prefer to receivefrom people within your own continent. Shipping worldwide isn’t the issue, it’s the import fees on arrival for Europeans (and probably Australians as well).
I do agree it might be a ‘good’ solution. Kinda a bummer, since I enjoyed the Secret Santa being international worldwide. On the other hand, it would reduce shipping times as well, so the chances of receiving your Christmas gifts at the end of February would decrease.
I do think it’s good to discuss this early, @nauticads. I actually thought about it myself recently when I had to pay import fees on a gift-marked arrival…
We usually say the presents should be at least 25 USD. If what I receive would be marked as 25 USD value, the import isn’t too high. But loads of people send for 100-200 USD presents, and if the packages are also declared at that value, you might end up having to pay 50-75 USD just to pick up your presents…
Stupid EU import rules… In the past marking as gift would be enough to not pay import fees (and you also won’t pay import fees if it’s below 22 euros in value). Now you pay import fees on almost everything outside of the EU, regardless of value, marked as gift, or VAT payments done beforehand (in the case of eBay)… It’s also annoying with low value items. Just yesterday for example I paid 4.25 euros import fees on a 1 GBP + 2.50 GBP shipping item from the UK. The import fees were slightly higher than the item + shipping, haha…
Ah well, not much we can do about it unfortunately.
Here in Finland packages marked as gifts won’t be taxed if the value is under 45 euros. I had someone ship be something as gift and customs asked me to prove the value of the package. So even if you mark the package as gift and mark the value down the receiver still might need to confirm the value of the contents. However, I didn’t send them screenshots or anything. I only wrote “the sender said that the package contains trading cards around the value of 25 usd”. That was enough for them to release the package.
But yeah this is something that needs to be considered - all EU based members will have to pay custom tax for everything that comes from outside of EU. Unless they are marked as gifts and the value is under 45 € (not sure if the gift value is the same for all EU countries or just Finland)
Mods are discussing potentially splitting regions this year. Even if we split into NA, euro, etc. people will have to be aware of their own import laws. We can make people aware of the import duty thresholds. But if your countries laws prohibit receiving a gift, there is nothing we can do.