There are many ways to hoodwink the tax collector, one of them being tariff engineering.
The actual practice can be traced back to 1882, when an importer in the United States had sugar coated with molasses to avoid higher duties imposed on lighter-coloured sugar.
The Supreme Court ruled the act to be perfectly legal as long as the goods were truly invoiced.
Similarly, Columbia Sportswear uses so called ‘nurse’s pockets’, or small pockets near the waistline on many of its women’s shirts, because women’s shirts with pockets below the waistline have a lower rate of duty than shirts without such pockets when imported into the US.
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