This is a heads up to all of us Brits & possibly Europeans.

Icedog recently sent a beautiful hand carved rattle for Squid. It is utterly gorgeous & I will be starting another thread on it, when I can work out where to post it(?) Since it came from the US to the UK, it somehow attracted the attention of Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. What stunned us was that Royal Mail did not even attempt to deliver it. They put a note through the door saying that they wanted £30 for Customs & "handling" charges.

This prompted me to enquire what the thresholds were for Excise (import) & VAT (sales tax). What I found was this. The basic threshold for import duty is £8. There are exceptions including when the goods are a gift, but even a gift becomes liable for tax if it is worth, or declared as being worth, more than £16. The real bugger of it is that if HMRC levy duty, the Royal Mail will charge you an additional £8 for collecting the duties.

Consider yourself warned chaps.

The relevant links are:
Royal Mail
http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/c...mediaId=400362

HMRC
HM Revenue & Customs