MAF inspection bill

[JandM]

Doesn't matter how you list everything on the inventory - mine was very specific and even detailed all cleaning and treatment - they still want to inspect almost everything! I'm so disappointed in MAF and am starting to believe that it is all just a big scam. After all - they charged me £300 (twice the value of the contents) for inspecting a small plastic crate that came via air freight and they never even opened it. Big fat liars/scammers or what! Then you learn when you get here that they've let in loads of poisonous creepy crawlies from Oz! How does that work then?

This sounds as if you believe MAF is just one or two people, who personally have it in for you! - there are about 2000 who work in the organization. Are you expecting a government department to work by simply taking the word of the people it has to deal with? Yes, YOU did clean and treat your property, but anybody could SAY that on their forms, and they don't know you to be able to judge you are honest. They have to have a procedure that will cope with the lazy and the fraudulent, which means the honourable citizens need to go through it, too.

I hope your inspection goes well. It should do when they've started to check, and seen that your belongings truly are clean. But don't give them a hard time on the basis of 1) your crate (it probably wasn't the same officers) or 2) Australian imports (your officials are still there, so they didn't get the sack for that), and you're more likely to get through the day with the minimum of hassle.

[Sun777]

Just to add, we had a wooden buddha statue which was overlooked by MAF & once it arrived, delivery person noticed that the whole wooden statue was infected with some kind of insects & suggested us to return it back to MAF (possible Bio security) for inspection. We returned it and are yet to hear about the outcome; its not possibly for any country to have 100% accuracy while doing inspection (as its tiring manual work).