The way dotfiles are usually missed in a situation like this is when the command is given a wildcard:

That will tar up everything beneath the current directory, except for any dotfiles in the current directory, because * in a shell doesn't match those (normally, though some shells might under some circumstances). The shell will interpolate the * to mean all non-dotfiles in the current directory, and tar will get them and anything under them (including any dotfiles in subdirecories).

The usual way around that is to tar up the current directory, rather than the contents:

tar -czf /tmp/file.tgz .
[download]

I don't know if this was the OP's problem, since I don't know what he had in $DEST, but it's a possibility.