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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Reminded me of when I got to see one of the customs declaration for an off-shore oil platform built here in Norway.

It was a single-item declaration: one oil plaform.

However, the elecronic customs message format didn't have enough digits to fit the item value, over a billion NOK IIRC.

After some calls with customs, they had to send it with a fictitious item value and add the true value in a free-text field.

This worked fine since there were no duties or taxes on exporting oil platforms, so no cross-checks that would fail.

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Couldn't they split it into "Oil platform part 1" "part 2" and so on? Or "Oil platform metal parts" and such. Kinda seems like one object being too large in some measure for a single message is a predictable edge case.

I'd be worried about that raising money laundering flags, like someone splitting transactions into a bunch of $9,999 chunks.

Since they were talking it over with customs, they would clear any flags as "we agreed on this solution because the item cost was too large to fit the message format".

It's not like Google, where there's automatic inhuman consequences. And even Google can make exceptions if they want to, just they usually don't care.

I think Customs is on to that -- that was how Saddam Hussein got the precision parts of his "supergun" out of Europe into Iraq, the parts were all labeled as oil industry related.

While that is to circumvent arms export control, which may be executed by customs officers, but is mostly a topic for special departments, often requiring government permission.

They can, the problem is that if you declare this as different parts then you will have to pay taxes accordingly to the chosen HSCode for each one in the declaration.

If you search for the HSCODE you will find that offshore oil and natural gas drilling and production platforms have their own, 8431434000, which means if you declare only this one you will pay no taxes.

In my experience they're also a bit particular about declaring things as they are on the border.

An oil platform getting towed into place is one piece, not an IKEA kit or similar.

That said, could very well be the local customs officer was just totally unprepared and this was the solution they came up with on the spot. I've seen other cases where different companies have gotten directly contradictory instructions from different customs offices on the exact same scenario.

Yes, the final say is always on the particular custom where the goods will get the clearance, so they will call the shots on the way the procedure should be done.

The IT system in place is just there to accommodate how customs should proceed, so if they have different ways to solve the problem, the customs officer will just find the one he's more used to.

But you're right that if there's a HSCode for something built, furniture vs wood for example, then the more "accurate" should be used, as they will have different tariffs too.

  > An oil platform getting towed into place is one piece, not an IKEA kit or similar.

They could call it the Integrated Key Energy Anchor.

LOL. I’m on the receiving end of these customs declarations, and stories like this are the reason the copies are so notoriously hard to parse programmatically… lovely, thanks for sharing.

What’s the “escape value” that triggers people to read the free text field? Or is it just zero?

And if zero, how often do they just get mistakenly processed as zero value?

Whatever it is is likely to be part of the endless arms race between customs agencies and smugglers, so I doubt you'll get the privilege of finding out.

Zero; or an arbitrary number; or a number that was destined for another field, but the commanding officer misread and filled the form wrong; or null; or as many digits as fit in the field. Any of these.

In a case like this, they usually call ahead to let customs know, and follow up with the declaration ID once it has been sent.

Apart from that, customs is very tight lipped about what triggers manual processing of a declararion.

Though for example a large discrepancy between weight and value typically would lead to it getting flagged for manual processing, as I understand it.

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