Traveller with guilty conscience sends border officers note, money

Customs officers have seen plenty of strange things at work but the contents of an envelope, including this handwritten letter, was on another level.

Only in Canada.

Canadian customs officers at a port of entry on the border of Ontario and the US state of Minnesota received an interesting handwritten letter from a visitor who had crossed into the country last year.

“Attention Customs,” the letter to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) read, according to Fox News.

“Please accept this $10.00 for duty on an item I neglected to declare in 2018. Thank you.”

Enclosed with the note was a $10 note.

#ClearConscience #CBSA officers in #PigeonRiver received an anonymous letter
with a penned apology for failing to have declared an item in 2018. Sent from
the #ThunderBay area, the letter contained a $10 bill to cover the taxes. #HonestCanadians #IDeclare pic.twitter.com/4qmugBhBxX

— Border Services NOR (@cbsanor) March 18, 2019

The letter was delivered to the CBSA, but the envelope had no return address, no signature and no other information in regards to what the delinquent item was.

“Everyone was rather surprised because it doesn’t happen very often as far as we can tell,” CBSA spokesperson Chris Kealey said to Canada’s CBC.

Mr Kealey said the envelope came from the Ontario city of Thunder Bay, north of the port at Pigeon River that had received the letter.

The traveller had originally said they had nothing to declare … but their conscience got the better of them.

The money will be kept as revenue for the government, Mr Kealey told Fox News.

“The money goes into the general revenue fund for the government. But what is odd is it was filed under a revenue code called ‘conscience money’,” he said.

“So we were surprised to get the note, but we were surprised that there existed this code, too.”

This article originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission