A good proportion of my time at work in Qatar is spent doing paperwork; sending and receiving documents, and having things signed, stamped and officiated. Every task seems to involve endless amounts of bureaucracy.
As mentioned previously, there are many hurdles that must be crossed when it comes to running a lab in Qatar (buying chemicals, setting up meetings) and sending, in reality ‘importing’, items for the laboratory is no exception to this rule.
Large items (lab equipment, large scale consumables) must be sent by either a courier or shipping company* but simply having the sender write our address on the package is not sufficient. Importing items to Qatar is costly and time consuming but if you are lucky, the company that you order from will have a local distributer who will be able to handle most of the customs and duty related issues for you. If there is no local distributer however, the sender (them) and the receiver (us) will have to make sure that every single box is ticked before the item is shipped and successfully received in Doha.
Before the items are shipped, the sender must provide the following paperwork; a Bill of Landing or Airway Bill, the Commercial Invoice, Packing List and the Certificate of Origin which must be attested (signed and stamped) by the Qatar Embassy and the Chamber of Commerce in the country of origin. Specifically, the Commercial Invoice must clearly state the country of origin, currency, specific item description in English, unit price and total price by item, grand total price (including shipping), total number of packages, gross weight and the purchase order number. Plus, all of this documentation must be sent to us at least 2 weeks before the shipment is sent in order for us to obtain a duty exemption letter to avoid paying any tax on the shipment (we are located in a duty free zone). Like I said, this all takes time, and it also takes a fair amount of money.
How did we figure all of this out? Well, I’d love to say that there is a centralised importing website where this information is clearly listed but no, we learned all of this the hard way which included a lot of running around, phone calls and trips to the Qatari customs office and, unfortunately, several large pieces of equipment being returned to the sender; I’m pretty sure we’ll never make those mistakes again.
*Qatar has a postal system called Qpost but there is no daily scheduled delivery service; if you want to be able to receive post, you much rent a P.O. Box from the main post office.
