- Fri Nov 14, 2014 9:45 pm
#41364
Too bad no one here is a government lackey that can shed some light
Hello!
I'm not a Government thing but I work in airfreight and this is sort of what I do for a living, but on a much bigger industrial scale. Now follows a very lengthy goings-on...
Technically, EVERY commercial shipment that enters a country (UK here, but it's little different anywhere else) should be subject to import duty and tax. Because that's a massive pain in the arse, there are permissable levels of value under which these things don't apply. And with the mail service, they handle so many packages per day and the number of staff is being constantly whittled away, it's still a massive pain in the arse, so very few packages get properly scrutinised. Well, that used to be the case.
Especially since the (former) Royal Mail got privatised, this sort of thing is getting looked at more as it's a rather profitable venture, but it's still the cheapest alternative even if you lose out.
The ceiling for avoiding duties and taxes altogether has lowered recently, from £20 down to £15 - almost certainly to nab more DVD imports than anything else. H.M. Revenue and Customs are quite an accommodating bunch however and are pretty reasonable with their excise duty fees...
+ If a parcel is declared (and I'll come to this bit in a minute) at a value over £15 but less than £135, then VAT is applied at 20%, but no import duty is collected.
+ If a parcel is declared as being over £135 but the total import duty amount payable is less than £9, then the duty amount is waived. 20% VAT still applies.
+ If a parcel comes in at over £135 and the duty amount comes to over £9, then you have to pay the duty amount, plus VAT charged at 20% of the declared value plus the duty amount.
Not sure what the current duty rate is for vinyl records - I'm back in work on Sunday so can look it up if none of the labels here who import US stuff into the EU pipe up with this in the meantime, it's done as a % of the declared CIF (Carriage, Insurance and Freight) value of the goods which factors in the flat unit cost, any other shipper's charges such as packing, plus the postage.
How to get round it? Well, it's still a bit of a lottery but there are ways and means... The shipper can underdeclare the value of the goods on the CN22 (little customs label) to under whatever amount - LITA sent me 2 Mark Lanegan Anthology sets in a massive box and said it was worth $5. BUT this isn't surefire: one thing that can get overlooked when filling the bloody things out is that if they don't clearly state the currency the value is declared at, then the people at the other end are to assume that it's in the currency at destination. Something valued at $18 and the $ gets missed becomes £18 over here, so a thing that is under the threshold when it leaves goes over the threshold when it gets here.
Also, if the person inspecting said package sees the declared low value and suspects shenanigans, they can open the package to see if there's an invoice in there. And if there is, they can/will use that value instead.
So - ask your vendor if they can show x amount on the CN22 and leave the invoice out of the box. They are well within their rights to say no, but most will bend a little if they don't do so as policy anyway. Ask them to declare it as a gift - this is pretty crucial as the tax-free threshold rises (for the UK, it goes from £15 to £36), this is the easiest way all-round and the shipper doesn't risk an almighty (albeit fairly unlikely) bollocking for misdeclaration
Avoid Amazon internationally because, well, Amazon, but also because they will always declare the full amount of whatever without exception.
And so, for the benefit of anyone still reading this drivel, the small matter of the Royal Mail Processing Fee.
It used to be £2, then went up to £4, now it's £8. And although I've fallen foul of this a fair few times, I'm going to defend it.
they're not just thrown on a pile and then delivered. Anything that gets picked up for charges (Vinyl LPs will get done more often than others because they're big boxes) has to be properly declared to Customs, and someone has to sit there and do it. It's not the hardest job in the world (which is why they let me do it), but there's still a whole bunch of stuff to be done and it all gets weird in terms of quotas, competition and suchlike so the poor schmo at the keyboard has to put in where it's come from, what it is and what it's worth. Sounds simple, but the "what it is" bit is a pain in the balls as everything that can possibly move and be sold anywhere will have an HS code which is an 11-digit horror (852410 is the chapter heading for gramophone records with the last 5 digits being further subdivisions I can't believe I'm doing this shit on a Friday night I'm just glad there's wine here with me). This has to be done for every single declared package over the threshold for VAT and above. And as the processing fee goes in as profit, this will probably increase again soon.
Yadda yadda etc. £8 is cheap. If you bring stuff in by courier (DHL etc), you will get hit for these charges pretty much 100% of the time as they declare everything to customs whether it's low value or not (their shipping charges will usually go over the threshold anyway), and they go from £15 - £20+ a time. Commercial Freight Forwarders (Hi there!) will charge £35+ 100% of the time and make up another load of charges sometimes depending on how nice you are to us on the phone. The Royal Mail, USPS etc are a massive bunch of wankers from the person who throws your valuable stuff in the back of his van to the dick who leaves rubber bands in your garden and hides your mail in the bin, but for what they do (compared to what everyone else does it for) is nothing short of majestic. Sadly, they're realising this and are working their way up to everyone else's price structure rather than vice versa, but that's commerce.
And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play outside.
