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BERMUDA | RSS PODCAST

Not much of a welcome

Welcome home: Passengers arrive at LF Wade International Airport.

October 8, 2012Dear Sir,What a change at the Airport. Now it appears Customs are pulling over 90 percent of arriving passengers for “questioning”.I have been to dozens of countries and Customs elsewhere are usually only interested in drugs. Bermudians are generally tax paying people and pay their dues, so what’s the fuss?Yes, I had about an hour of it. The Customs lady was “doing her job”. But is it really necessary? In the end she decided we were not tax dodgers and we were on our way after a few discussions about “the law”.A few things however;n She was insistent it’s the law to break down every purchase into each of the ten declaration categories. Why is that when its one tax rate 25 percent on everything. Is it because the Government statistics department like to tell us what we spend our money on? They do that every few months. Based on this if you shop at one of those big stores like Wal-Mart or Target you will spend hours breaking down the total for the statistics Department. What a complete waste of time and money.n What about interpretation? I purchased a pair of golf shoes are they shoes or sporting goods? Let’s say this caused some “debate”. If you purchased a back-up camera for your car - is that Electronic & Photographic or belonging to the camera section. It’s a waste of time because it’s going to be 25% tax whatever.n Yellow customs tickets. They charge all this tax but now there is only one place they issue the yellow tickets - in town. So waste more time going to town with all your goods to get your yellow tickets - the Airport are too busy questioning everyone and don’t issue them anymore (that would be convenient and time efficient as you are at the airport taking the tax paid goods out of the country).Is this really helping Bermuda? Is Bermuda really “open for business” because business = people, but there again, people are leaving in their thousands and everyone who is left will have to pay more tax, so why am I wasting my time asking the question?Oh and by the way maybe the Statistics Department could turn their attention to how much the Bermuda economy (GDP) shrank last year and probably shrank again in the first half of 2012. All the well rated tax raising countries publish GDP numbers quarterly but not us. We don’t have last year’s number yet. They must all be busy analysing those customs forms and counting the tax collected.Travel safely all and ‘welcome home’.TRAVELLERSPaget