By Spokesman Newsroom
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Wednesday 31st January 2024) – There will be no extension whatsoever on the Christmas dutyfree concessions, according to the Head of the Risk Management Unit of the St. Kitts and Nevis Customs & Excise Department Desraul Hazel, who has also informed about the “never had” volumes of over 400,000 (four hundred thousand) packages processed.
He made the disclosure when asked about such during the department’s appearance (In observance of International Customs Day) on ‘The Edge’ radio programmewith host Devonne Corneliusaired live on ZIZ on Friday 26th January 2024. “The duty free concessions end on January 31st at 11:59:59 [pm].
There will be no extension whatsoever; let us make that clear. There is a misconception that is out in the public that once it arrives in the warehouse in the [United] States, we will honour it. If it has not landed in St.
Kitts by 11:59:59, the goods will be dutiable,” Hazel stated. According to him: “Last year the duty free concession started on the 15th of November. My unit-Risk Management-is the one that processes all incoming courier cargo.
Two days after the announcement, my unit was swamped because people basically had their carts full waiting for the announcement to click purchase order. So since then we have been inundated with packages. For the period January 1st to December 31st 2023, over 400,000 packages were processed by my unit [in] small St.
Kitts; the duty-free concession helped a lot with that.” As understood in relation to items allowed duty-free “Once it’s for personal use, there is no limit on the items. We’ve seen everything; everything you can think of.” When asked if the over 400,000 is record breaking, Hazel replied “I have to scrunch the numbers from the years before but we’ve never had these volumes.” “The basis of risk management is to focus the resources where it is needed so we have risk criteria and parameters where the lowest cargo, we have a way of dealing with that to streamline those and then we focus on the high risk cargo.
If risk management was not implemented up [at] Customs, I really don’t know how we would have survived 2023 because it is impossible for us to check all 400,000 packages but with the risk management in place, it was quite the task but we achieved it,” was Hazel’s response when quizzed about dealing with the influx of so many packages. As it relates to whether consideration be given for an extension of the duty-free concession, Hazel expressed: “The concession is a Christmas concession…for Christmas.
It started on November 15th long before Christmas and it ends on the 31st of January long after Christmas so keep that in perspective.”
