A preliminary search gives the following information, although for an even more accurate picture we would need to see exactly how they spend their customs money. Maybe I will search for more finely detailed information later. For now we will make the false assumption that all customs money is spent on mail and all people doing international inspections work on mail. US Annual customs budget: ~$11.84 billion , ~21,180 employees who would potentially screen mail (not counting Mexican border patrol etc) , (best source I can find for international mail now was projected for 2004 , I know there are better sources out there but I don't have the time to hunt them down right now: https://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/cs02/2d.htm, .8 billion from USPS alone not counting other services, so 800 million). This means that the US spends roughly $14.8 of customs money per internationally shipped piece of mail. However, we need to keep in mind that a huge percentage of US customs money is spent on border patrol, judging from the employee distribution I think it is safe to estimate half of their money goes to this, leaving us with $7.4 perhaps. It also means that there is about one inspector per 37,771 pieces of international mail. Australia customs budget : ~$1.13 billion, 5,674 employees (total, can't find fine grained details, but I doubt they have much of a border patrol, which makes up most of the rest of US customs), inspects 405,500 incoming international packages and 776,000 letters per week, 138 million incoming international mail items per year (source for last statistic was hard to find so putting here: http://www.daff.gov.au/aqis/mail) . This means that Australia spends about $8.19 cents on customs per every piece of international mail, and they have one inspector per 24,437 pieces of international mail. Keep in mind that this is not actually perfectly accurate as I don't have access to ultra detailed information atm. well that is actually at odds with Australia customs statistics I have found in the past stating that 100% of all international mail is inspected. From this we can conclude that 61.44 million items of incoming international mail are inspected per year to Australia, where as they get 138 million international mail items per year. Maybe the inconsistency is because customs does not include letter mail in their report of the percentage of mail they inspect, I believe this may be the case. Something is obviously up though, as these numbers are at odds with the percentage of inspected mail records I can find (and have posted here before) from Australian customs sources. Please keep in mind that these statistics are nearly worthless due to my current lack of ability to find detailed statistics. We would need to know the total number of customs employees specifically screening mail items, the total number of all incoming packages (which I could only find for Australia), to extrapolate the numbers to be recent for both (instead of one from an estimate for 2004 for USA), and lots of other things. This is not detailed information, and is just a quick thing I threw together to be able to form a basic idea for myself, or to see if there is a huge difference. In a nut shell, this is the result I came up with, again not using detailed enough information for this to be highly accurate , just a rough rough approximation: US spends ~$7.4 per piece of incoming international mail, Australia spends $8.19 . As the input data was very rough and there is not a huge difference here, I think it is fair to guess that they probably spend essentially the same amount of money on customs checking mail per piece of international mail. Note that I cut the US amount in half in order to attempt to filter border patrol spending, but I did not do this with Australia. Although this certainly adds distortion, I think it will be minimal, as US likely spends vastly more customs money on border patrol than Australia does, and as their employee statistics show about half are employed with border patrol and not inspections. US has 1 inspector per 37,771 pieces of incoming mail, Australia has 1 per 24,437 pieces of incoming mail. Please note that I was able to find decently fine grained information regarding the number of US customs agents who work inspecting incoming items, but not for Australia. When this is factored in, the numbers will certainly be closer together. Anyway I just want to reiterate one more time that these numbers are not going to be very high quality, and that I was mainly looking for a sharp difference between the two that would indicate one spends far more resources on mail customs than the other. As I did not find a sharp difference, it may indicate that they spend roughly the same amount of resources on this. But as there was not a sharp difference between the two with the information I was able to find, I would say that this is inconclusive. Please help me find up to date statistics on these things , and as fine grained as possible, so we can come to a more conclusive finding.