Aug. 23 (UPI) — Many foreign governments are planning to stop some mail services to the United States after Friday’s expiration of the tariff exemption on low-cost goods.
France, Germany, India and the Britain temporarily have already suspended some mail services to the United States due to the expiration of the de minimis tariff exemption on low-cost goods, The Washington Post reported.
Other nations are planning to halt services.
The mail disruption could delay the receipt of some packages from those nations and others that might likewise halt some mail deliveries to U.S. destinations.
It also might lead to tariffs of $80 or more for respective products.
The suspensions won’t affect letters or small parcels worth less than $100 in many countries, Politico reported.
“The suspension will be maintained for the time strictly necessary to adopt the necessary operational measures to meet the new obligations of the United States,” the Spanish national postal service Correos said Friday.
On Friday, Belgian postal service Bpost stopped shipping parcels to the U.S. on Saturday, the company announced in a statement.
Britain’s Royal Mail, planning to halt service next week, said it hopes the stop would only last few days and will have “a new system up and running,” the BBC reported.
In France, “Despite discussions with the U.S. customs services, no time was granted to postal operators to organize themselves and ensure the necessary IT developments for compliance with the new established rules,” La Post said, according to reports in Le Monde.
In Germany, Deutsche Post and DHL Parcel Germany temporarily suspended business customer parcels to the U.S. beginning Saturday. Shipments via DHL Express are not affected.
President Donald Trump in July signed an executive order that ended the de minimis tariff exemption for low-value shipments from all nations to the United States as of Friday.
“Many shippers go to great lengths to evade law enforcement and hide illicit substances in imports that go through international commerce,” Trump said in the July 30 executive order ending the tariff exemption.
“Some of the techniques employed by these shippers to conceal the true contents of shipments, the identity of the distributors and the country of origin of the imports include the use of re-shippers in the United States, false invoices, fraudulent postage and deceptive packaging,” Trump said.
He said the “risks of evasion, deception and illicit drug importation” are especially high for “low-value articles” that were subject to the duty-free exemption.
The de minimis exemption eliminated tariffs on goods valued at $800 or less when shipped or mailed to the United States.
Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to eliminate the tariff exemption, which enabled overseas interests to avoid tariffs and smuggle deadly substances, like fentanyl, into the United States, the DHS announced on July 31.
Congress in the 1930s passed the de minimis exemption amid the Great Depression and amended it several times afterward.
De minimis is a Latin term that means something is too insignificant for consideration, and the exempted amount was $200 for many years.
The Obama administration in 2016 increased the exempted amount from $200 to $800 to improve economic activity.