CEO Blog | Jarltech.com

23/04/2013

Impaired Business because of Customs?

1) Customs and the IT industry should in itself be friends, because there are on most goods simply no duties. A device with a power cable dos not cost any duty....

1) Customs and the IT industry should in itself be friends, because there are on most goods simply no duties. A device with a power cable dos not cost any duty. But if we get 100 units, plus 60 cables for Germany and 60 for England, which we then selectively distribute, then customs says that does not fit together, so duty must be paid for the cable. Annoying, but we are talking peanuts here.

So it came to pass, that a customs inspection over a period of several years not only gave us at headquarters weeks worth of work, but also ended with a tiny subsequent payment - as was expected. It's not that you can just specify at customs what you want: occasionally a customs examination is carried out, and you can rest assured that samples will be taken. The only positive aspect here was that the customs examiner was very friendly and that we even learned a few things along the way.

2) Now it gets even better: even customs can make a mistake and misjudge something. In our case, touch screen monitors believed to be televisions. The negative impact on us: 70,000 euros. Clearly an error, but this can happen, and a refund request should go through easily. This it did, but it has taken more than a year - and all we heard was: you got lucky. And regarding telephone inquiries at customs: please do not call anymore. Written requests? No answer. And that's where the German government is supposedly so well organized.

3) What has really annoyed us was a delivery of cash drawers via the Port of Hamburg last week. An examination of the container was requested. So what normally takes less than an hour, and I have seen it personally once: the container was opened, the officials only just peeked inside, and then they closed the container - 30 seconds tops. It was only harmful to business because for this brief act, whose meaning I do not want to doubt, we suddenly needed ten days lead time. "We have too much to do." Very well, but the economy has to run, right? So couldn't night shift or temporary workers carry this out? Alternatively, how about a 24-hour lead, and if the examiner cannot look at the container in this time frame, it just gets released? How are we to explain to the customer that the goods are just standing around?

My goodness, my dear customs office - get your act together - and please try to keep from hindering the economy as much as possible. Duties should be understood as a service to the economy, protect it from dumping prices, moonlighting, criminal goods and plagiarism - and this at a reasonable speed. It's not nice if everyone goes on a rant about you!

17/04/2013

Our first house search

It really is a bright start to the day when not only the sun shines, but there also is a five-person squad from the criminal investigation department, holding a...

It really is a bright start to the day when not only the sun shines, but there also is a five-person squad from the criminal investigation department, holding a search warrant, is waiting for you at your company in the morning. And our somewhat shocked office manager standing next to them.

It was clear that this case did not concern us - who has ever heard of someone being arrested for offering good service (haha), and the cover girl on our catalogue is neither naked nor underage.

What actually is appalling, however, is the scale of the crime because of which they are investigating at our and five further companies. A longtime employee of one of our vendors actually sold goods worth about a million euros - during a period of three or four years - without his employer knowing. And he sold to distributors who thought they were buying the goods directly. By the way, this is not information from the investigation, but from the deceived company itself, that informed us months ago.

As for us, we placed our orders directly with the vendor via e-mail, while the goods often came from a company that was owned by the fraudster. The pretended reason for this was a lawsuit against a former "exclusive distributor" of the vendor, which required the detour. Accordingly, payments were made to this company.

That did not work out well, because, at some point, we needed to return goods, which we sent to the vendor directly. They, however, wondered about devices with dubious serial numbers and started investigating.

Incidentally, the vendor is owned by an investor, and if I were him, I would have dismissed the CEO, first thing. Fraud is nasty, but falling for it is not that clever either - especially considering the huge sum.

Well, we were able to contribute a fair amount of documentation, that has been seized by the criminal investigators (who were very friendly and constructive) - although all the effort might be for naught, as the accused man has... disappeared.