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comment by elizabeth
elizabeth  ·  3187 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 2, 2016

We're selling beard oil and have not really had any problems as of yet. However, I don't think the way we did things are 100% kosher (I don't really have a tax id in the states which I think i'm probably supposed to have). We've been getting away with i because shipments of 100$-1000$ value are not really worth the hassle for the IRS. Probably bit off more than I can chew but my thinking is that if we're successful enough to be spotted, we'll have the monies to pay some professional to get us out of trouble. Pretty reckless approach, but at the same time paying 1000$ for some registrations and all the mental headache was really not worth it when we started because it was all a big experiment that we only made about 1000$ profit on in 2015. If it gets more serious, i'm ready to deal with the headache.





goobster  ·  3187 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My beard approves!

And you are kinda OK in the US as long as your sales are under about $15k, and you have no bank transactions over $10k. At that point you trigger certain flags that bring you to the attention of the authorities.... if they haven't already noticed the products coming across the border. :-)

Good luck with it!

_refugee_  ·  3187 days ago  ·  link  ·  

$10k transactions at a bank, whether all at once or aggregate over a day, trigger the filing of a CTR (Currency Transaction Report) at U.S. Banks. This is $10k across all accounts you hold at a bank.

DO NOT STRUCTURE YOUR DEPOSITS TO TRY AND AVOID THIS $10K LIMIT. It will land you in a bigger world of trouble as it will look like you are money laundering and deliberately attempting to avoid the filing of a CTR.

There are also SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) - if you look like you are structuring deposits (for instance, depositing just under the CTR threshold, especially over multiple days) - a SAR will get filed, because of AML (Anti-Money Laundering) issues.

elizabeth  ·  3187 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thank you :) We assumed we were fine with the customs, big surprise it got stuck on a shipment of only 1k. Fingers crossed it doesn't all fall through.