DHL Customs South Africa

So far we as a company have received nothing but disgusting service from the customs department. To the point that when my director phoned the complaints department it was escalated to Aaron Zulu who had the audacity to argue with him. We received the arrival notice on the 6th Dec and got payment confirmation for the import duties on the 7th. By the 10th they had informed us that shipment was stopped by customs and that they needed additional paperwork. I had sent this through on that same day. On the 11th DHL had requested the freight statement for our shipment, as they had advised that customs needs this. This is where the problems started. This statement is, according to Aaron, a breakdown of the shipping costs that we had paid, had to be from DHL and was actually our responsibility to acquire. We receive a proforma invoice for the amounts payable from our supplier which includes the goods and shipping, how can I ask the them for a breakdown of that shipping amount from DHL? Its got nothing to do with us, thats what they quoted. In any case the supplier was unable to get this document as was their forwarder as they dont get billed per parcel they send, they get billed monthly for the weight they have sent over that month.

I eventually phone customs myself and spoke to the inspector there dealing with this case and he informed me that the actual issue was that DHL declared the wrong amount initially. I phoned him on 2 separate occasions to confirm this and my director phoned the Customs help desk which confirmed the same. Aaron and his team at DHL deny this is the case. We decided to get in contact with Aarons superiors to get this issue resolved and by the 24th he rep**** that the amounts we paid on the original invoice did not add up to the amounts on our bank statement. So between the 10th and the 24th their excuse/story had now changed as neither him nor his team at DHL or even the inspector at customs had mentioned this. I sent through our bank statements on the 24th showing the amounts we paid which corresponded to the invoice amount we got from our supplier.

Since then the issue has shifted back to the freight statement again as the Cargo Receipt i sent DHL on the 17th was not sufficient. This was after Aaron had told me it would be. He is still insisting that they did not declare the wrong amount initially but cannot provide proof of this. Customs cannot provide me with any paperwork to support this as we are deemed a 3rd party in this matter.

So to sum it up we have to pay a penalty for 2 reasons:

1- The amount declared was incorrect from DHL (according to customs) 2- DHL cannot provide a freight statement from DHL in Singapore.

So where does this leave us as the client? Our projects are now delayed as our items have been sitting at customs for nearly a month and we are loosing money because of the incompetence from DHL's customs team.

We have already told our supplier they are not to use DHL again as we cannot afford to go through this again. We are still going to take this matter further legally as this behaviour and lack of service cannot go without repercussions. We have spent a fortune on import duties with DHL over the last year especially and its disgusting how we get treated. We of course understand that its December and businesses tend to run on skeleton staff but we needed these items urgently and would not have normally ordered at this time