As a result, you may be responsible for paying the tax yourself.

A recent audit of what’s called excise-tax “leakage” conducted over the past year and released this fall by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that direct-to-consumer, foreign-sourced fishing and bowhunting products siphon off between $6 and $17 million annually from the conservation fund their domestic competitors are required to support through excise taxes.

The research, coordinated by the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI), the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) and the Archery Trade Association (ATA), looked only at archery and sportfishing gear; there is currently no equivalent study of leakage in non-archery hunting gear. However, because firearms and ammunition are highly regulated, the market for foreign-made, direct-to-consumer products is likely relatively small compared to the largely unregulated archery and fishing markets.

This leakage is relatively new and tracks the rise in e-commerce as consumers bypass traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores to buy arrows, fishing lures, and even bows from online retailers. While many internet shopping sites collect the excise tax on sporting goods and pass it on to the U.S. Treasury Department for eventual distribution to state wildlife agencies, many foreign manufacturers that ship their products directly to American consumers don’t pay the tax.

The main source of “leakage” seems to be arrows, says Dan Forster, vice president and chief conservation officer for the Archery Trade Association.

“There are other product categories that are bypassing the system, but our members tell us that arrow shafts are far and away the category” that is circumventing the tax.

“We estimate the leakage is a minimum of 8% of the $50 million in excise taxes that the archery industry pays annually,” says Forster. “When you’re thinking of the U.S. government and its overall tax collection, that’s a rounding error. But in an industry like ours, that’s an average loss of a couple hundred thousand dollars per state, which means a couple of full-time biologist or wildlife management positions and maybe a shooting range. And that impact is occurring every year that we don’t close this loophole.”

The GAO audit recommends Congress consider making online marketplaces, such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart.com, responsible for collecting the 10 to 11% excise tax on archery and fishing tackle imports that they facilitate.

Read the GAO report.

The entire issue of tax “leakage” is a useful reminder of how and why these revenues exist. Conservation taxes are the gas in the tank of America’s remarkable engine of wildlife management that perpetuates our hunting and angling traditions.

Taxes are collected by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and then distributed annually to state and tribal fish-and-game agencies to fund wildlife management and hunter education, conservation-area purchase and maintenance, and even shooting ranges. When the taxes were established — in the 1930s for the hunting-gear tax and in 1950 for the fishing-tackle tax — the revenue-collection mechanism didn’t account for online retailers or direct-to-consumer product fulfillment that bypasses traditional tax collectors.

“The tax, whether we’re talking Pittman-Robertson on the hunting side or Dingell-Johnson on the fishing side, is a manufacturers’ tax,” explains Forster. “It’s collected at the first point of sale in the U.S. The normal scenario is that when a U.S. manufacturer produces a product and either sells it in bulk to a wholesaler or to a big retailer, the tax is levied at that first point of sale.”

Consumers don’t see the tax, because it’s already been levied and collected before sporting goods appear on store shelves. But the prices consumers pay is adjusted upward to cover the tax, which is 11% on bows and anything that touches a bow, including strings, peeps, sights, rests, and stabilizers as well as broadheads and quivers. The tax is .62 per arrow shaft, a number that’s adjusted annually for inflation. On the fishing side, the tax is 10% on rods, reels, fishing line, lures, landing nets, and spear guns.

“As that product moves further down the line, ultimately to retail, most folks like you and me who are buying these products never see the tax,” says Forster. “It’s hidden in the cost of the item, so you can’t tell it’s there. That’s part of our problem. People don’t really understand that the manufacturers are paying in to our excise tax fund, and that it’s going for good things” that sustain hunting and fishing.

But the rise of e-commerce has created mechanisms that allow manufacturers to bypass tax collection, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue for conservation. Forster stresses that these importers are not conspiring to avoid paying the tax, but rather exploiting an oversight that should be addressed in the interests of consistency and fairness.

He notes that online retailers like Amazon and Walmart.com can’t be defined as importers, because they rarely warehouse product. Instead, they facilitate the transaction between U.S. consumers and overseas suppliers, but don’t actually touch the product, which is shipped directly from the manufacturer to the consumer.

“In the case of an Amazon, there’s no real importer of record,” says Forster. “The rules weren’t developed to consider a scenario like we have today, and the GAO report basically told us that we can’t fix this with a regulation change. We’re going to need a legislative change.”

Both the ATA and the ASA have lobbied Congress to address the leakage through legislation, as the GAO report recommends. Forster says he’s pessimistic the legislative fix can be accomplished this year, but because there’s little opposition to it, he’s hopeful it will pass the next Congress.

“We’re asking for exactly what the GAO study said, to move the burden of the tax further up the chain to the internet marketplace facilitator, who is acting very much like a traditional importer and therefore should be collecting and remitting the taxes on the products they import,” says Forster. “Absent the importer, the tax should be collected at the first point of sale, which is the end user, the consumer.”

Which brings us back to the topic at the start of this story. How would a casual bowhunter pay the excise tax on their bargain Chinese arrows?

“Consumers don’t know they’re liable for the tax, and there’s not a lot of information on the IRS website that explains how to pay the tax,” says Forster. “The GAO report also indicates that it costs something like $3.80 in administrative costs for each transaction to process the tax, so if you buy a dozen lures and your tax bill is .62 cents, everybody is going backward on that. Good tax policy says we should move the collection burden up the chain if we can. I think we’re going to be successful in getting a fix, but anytime you have to climb Capitol Hill and get a bill passed, it’s not an easy lift.”