Will a currency note be detected in a gift shipped internationally?

Post date: 2018-12-18 08:11:23

I am posting a Christmas gift to a friend abroad, and would like to include a €50 note in the parcel as a reimbursement for something they picked up for me in my absence. However, if the note will be detected during the shipping process I would prefer to wait, so that the recipient doesn't have to pay gift tax on the currency.

I'm shipping a gift from the US to Finland (under the €45 gift tax threshold). Part of the gift is a small book, and as I recently found a forgotten €50 note I thought to slip the note into the book pages as a fun surprise. But as this would bring the total value over the gift threshold, I would prefer not to do it if there is a decent chance that the note would be detected and the recipient would be penalised for it. (I've found Tulli to be pretty reasonable in the past, waiving tax on valuable parcels of personal items I've received from outside the EU, but none of those contained hard currency.) How likely is it that a single note, in the pages of a book, within a larger parcel would be noticed?

I realise to some extent it's up to chance, but if anyone has experience with such situations their feedback would be appreciated.

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