[Nhcoll-l] new US Customs regulations?

[Doug Yanega]

On 2/28/20 12:39 PM, Bentley, Andrew Charles wrote:
>
> Doug
>
> Are these issues on the US end or the international end?  Are they 
> related to customs or something else?  Do you have any info on the 
> forms – names, codes, etc.?
>
> If on the international end I would assume that the rules are 
> different for each country.  Are there specific countries that are 
> proving to be problematic?
>
It's strictly between us (or our university mailing office) and the 
USPS, as it's the USPS that has been rejecting our attempted shipments. 
We had been using form 2976-A and the small green form, and when those 
were rejected we tracked down the new form. But today, even with the 
2976-R form provided by USPS, they just returned one of those. 
Apparently, the regs changed some time back, but not all USPS offices 
griped about it, as people reported to me privately that they'd started 
getting rejects almost a year ago, so maybe our local agents were just 
cutting us slack until recently.

The proper form and filing procedure appears to be linked here: 
https://www.usps.com/international/customs-forms.htm

It's going to mean a bit more frustration to prepare shipments this way, 
given (1) yet another *$%@$ website that you can't use at all unless you 
create a user account and password to go with the 50 other accounts and 
passwords you have to navigate every day, and (2) the requirements of 
the online form, according to what Deb Trock told me:

"Another thing that took us a while to figure out is that on the very 
first page of the on-line form it will ask you for the weight of the 
package, which you will need to have before you start the form.  Then a 
couple of pages later it will ask you for the weight of the contents.  
If you put down the same weight that you had entered on the first page, 
it will reject your form because the weight of the contents is added to 
the weight of the box and packaging for the total weight.  We usually 
just put the total weight of the wrapped package on the first page and 
then subtract a pound for the box and wrapping when it asks for the 
weight of the contents a few pages later."

Frustrating, but not as bad as having packages actually returned to us 
for re-shipping, so we'll just have to accommodate.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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