Thread: New UK Customs Tariffs

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

I've been hit for customs chrges before, but i find it completely disgusting that a gift of any value should attract a charge! Look forward to seeing the rattle though. Maybe if you shook it a little it would soothe the irritation you're feeling?

Surely if it was a gift then it *should* be exempt from customs and import duties, as you didn't buy it, so there are no taxes you could be evading..?

I had some kind of bad surprise with the Swiss customs. Since three or four years ago, it is the post service that are paid and employed to do the customs jobs... and rules have changed (I learned that painfully a few months ago):

before: under 85$ you didn't pay taxes; over you paid 7.6% (our taxes for goods... books is 2.4); if your package weighted more than 2 kg, you paid a weight tax and that was it.

now: under 55$ you don't pay taxes; over you pay 7.6% + 15$ for "light" administrative work + something depending of the weight of the package (and a 10 more if something is not written correctly on the form); but, if you are "importing" goods like watch,... and apparently grooming products (they have a list you can find nowhere) you don't pay the 15 bucks for the administrative work but 30$!!! and the weight tax.

So... as you may have guessed: one day I received a razor for something like 80$ and had to pay 45$ more to the post/customs... and I'll let you imagine how much I had to pay when I received my package with creams and aftershaves for me and the wife from AOS... crazy, isn't it?

But usually it is not that bad and either I am lucky - the packages are small so they don't look at it properly - and I can go through with only the 15 bucks light tax, or I have asked the seller to decrease the price on the form...

Originally Posted by Tink

Surely if it was a gift then it *should* be exempt from customs and import duties, as you didn't buy it, so there are no taxes you could be evading..?

Duty and VAT are applied on products imported into the EU based on value delivered at destination, regardless of where the payment for the good came from. If the value seems inaccurate to the customs employee, it will be determined according to their lists. For Euroland countries (EU countries using the Euro), the amount under which no duty or VAT is applied by customs is 22 EUR. This amount includes the shipping charges in the sense that the value of the item plus the shipping charges must not exceed 22 EUR in order to be delivered duty and tax free. Not all customs officers are aware of this (or care about it, whichever the case) and strictly go by the value indicated on the customs form, but when sending something from the US to the EU, it is typically a very good idea to indicate a value below $15 on the customs form if you want to avoid your European friend getting hit with at least 30% duty and taxes.

I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't such a crapshoot. Sometimes you pay no duty sometimes you get hit. Sometimes the firm that delivers charges a fee for collecting the tax, sometimes not. Sometimes you have to go to a mail depot to collect the item + pay the tax, sometimes you have to pay at your door, sometimes you get invoiced after the event.

I seem to remember a private delivery firm once charged me a £15 fee for collecting £5 in tax!

Be careful about putting a low value on the paperwork. I'm sure Customs would be quite happy to impound and destroy the goods if they find out.

As a retired Custom's guy here in the U.S I will tell you #1 the old gift trick doesn't work. Unfortunately everyone sends a lot of gifts and so writing that on the declaration is like writing fragile. #2 The U.S is really not bad at all. Unless your unlucky or send something of great value or rarity you rarely pay if you send through the USPS. #3 Many countries depend on Customs fees for a big part of their revenue and countries, especially England and Canada are very wily and spare no effort to find any and all duties sometimes at the expense of weeks of waiting for you package.

Thanks Bigspendur. Useful to hear from the dark side

I am not suggesting for a moment that we defraud our respective governments. Not one bit. I mean they steal all they can from us, so why should we try to stop them? I merely posit that if you know what the rules are, you are better able to discuss the matter with your local customs agency. They do not seem to know what the rules are themselves & apply them in an apparently random manner. Silver was sent a very nice stand set from the US by icedog last year. It was worth approximately $400. Customs let it pass without a squeak....

Spike - That sux bigtime.
I can remember Aussie customs charging me Storage & Quarantine tax on top of Goods & Services tax but our value threshold is $999... not 8 quid

Having also been arse-bitten by HMCE, what REALLY racks me off is that: you firstly pay any import duty levied, THEN you pay the Royal Mail a 'handling fee' (utter garbage as the sender has already paid for the goods to be delivered!) THEN you pay VAT on the lot - goods, import duty, insurance (don't forget that little slice of the cake!) and handling fee.

It's just as well I just sharpen bloody razors.

And this, by the way, is the reason I only take honing work from EU countries - otherwise I may well have to pay import duty on something that isn't even mine (unless I jump through the HMCE regs as to 'letting me off paying') but then the PBC (poor bloody customer) may well be faced with import duty to get their own property back! Governments? Ah, don't get me started..................