Import tax POSTS brexit.

[lodore]

I purchased a network switch from fs.com on the 29th of May at a cost of £138. Today I get an unexpected Import tax bill from fedex for £52.85!
if I had received this import tax bill before receiving the item I would of likely refused the parcel and then ordered a different switch from a UK company. I am not sure where I stand with this.

When I have received invoices for import tax before I have always been advised of this before receiving the package. I don't believe any of the items have been from TNT before. does anyone know if this delay to be notified of import tax is standard timeframe for TNT?

Kind regards

[kalniel]

Seems to fit their FAQ:
https://www.tnt.com/express/en_gb/si...m-charges.html

we are often not aware of the charges levied until after we have delivered your package.

Check the bank details against the ones given on that page before paying too.

[kompukare]

Strangely enough as their website has a /uk and the talk about shipping same day from the UK, their prices are in UKP, their contact/about us is in the UK.
I would think fs.com have to sort this out, but maybe they can wiggle out?

[kalniel]

Strangely enough as their website has a /uk and the talk about shipping same day from the UK, their prices are in UKP, their contact/about us is in the UK.
I would think fs.com have to sort this out, but maybe they can wiggle out?

Yes, if they state the item would be shipped from the UK then I expect you could ask them to pay your bill. However the page I looked at on fs.com stated shipping from Germany:

Orders in stock will be shipped within 24 business hours from our Germany Warehouse.

[lodore]

Thanks for the responses. Looks like i will have to pay the import duty: https://www.fs.com/uk/service/fs_support.html

I will be certainly reviewing my future purchasing to avoid this again.

[kompukare]

Hope they didn't charge German MwSt (VAT) then. Looking at their listings, they do make it quite clear where an item is, but unlike Amazon they don't make it clear what you will end up paying.
And 20% on £138 is only half of your charge.
Amazon must be doing well out of Brexit as they are one of the few able to handle the complexity. Ebay claim they can, but are very very slow as I bought something for someone in RoI and it took nearly 4 weeks to get sorted.

[kalniel]

And 20% on £138 is only half of your charge.

There's also carrier handling fee and vat on carrier handling fee and maybe import duty + vat on import duty.

[kompukare]

There's also carrier handling fee and vat on carrier handling fee and maybe import duty + vat on import duty.

Yes, of course.
My point was that if a vendor sorted everything out and made it transparent then the handling fees wouldn't have applied hence the contrast with Amazon and ebay.

[jim]

Yes, of course.
My point was that if a vendor sorted everything out and made it transparent then the handling fees wouldn't have applied hence the contrast with Amazon and ebay.

It's up to you how far you want to fight it, but these handling fees are on incredibly dodgy ground as far as I'm aware.

You don't have a contract with Fedex, so they are absolutely trying it on. You obviously owe HMRC for the import tax, and if you want to fight that it's an entirely different story, but Fedex can't just decide to charge you a random amount for their services that you never contracted with them for.

So if you fight it hard enough, they'll likely fold on the handling fees. After all, if it goes to court and it turns out that they can't charge them... that's bad news for them.

[lodore]

I finally receved a response from fedex which is as follows:

I refer to your query on the use of our deferment account to pay duties and VAT to HM Revenue and Customs, and our Deferment Processing Fee. Unless you have your own deferment account and give us authority to use it, import duties and VAT will be paid on your behalf to HM Revenue & Customs using our own deferment account. We will then invoice you for the amount we have paid, plus our Deferment Processing Fee. All VAT invoices are sent on separate invoices from the freight costs.

The Deferment Processing Fee (DPF) is our administration fee for the use of our deferment account, which is held with HM Revenue & Customs. The charge covers financial guarantees we have to make. The DPF is calculated on the following tariff:

Amount of Duty & Vat Paid to Customs DPF charged

£0.00 - £400.00 £20.00
£400.01 and over 5% of the amount invoiced

Please note that this charge is subject to standard rate VAT at 20%

If the goods imported generate a high VAT and duty charge (typically over £1000-£5000), then you may be contacted and asked for payment up front.


I still believe they are trying to invoice me for services I didn't contract them for. I would of happily paid the fees owed to HMRC before delivery of the package. I am not sure where I stand with this. I didn't ask them to defer the payment. is there any way to pay HMRC directly rather than using the deferment account provided by fedex thus avoiding the fees that fedex are charging?

It seems to me that fedex are using brexit as an excuse to bill people for services they didn't ask for.

[Saracen999]

....

I still believe they are trying to invoice me for services I didn't contract them for. I would of happily paid the fees owed to HMRC before delivery of the package. I am not sure where I stand with this. I didn't ask them to defer the payment. is there any way to pay HMRC directly rather than using the deferment account provided by fedex thus avoiding the fees that fedex are charging?

It seems to me that fedex are using brexit as an excuse to bill people for services they didn't ask for.

I suspect you won't want to her this, and I sure as hell sympathise, bt you kinda did contract for it. Just not in the normal way. You contracted, albeit unintentionally (which, arguably, ight make the contract invalid but a judge would need to decide that, IMHO) by importing goods. IANAL but my understandimg is that regardless of whether you have a contract with Fedex or not (and you don't, in the normal sense) tax law says the person contracting the import is responsible for taxes and duties, unless agreed in advance with the seller that the seller is. And that wasn'tdone.

The alternative to copping this kind of admin fee is that when you import, your goods would sit in a customs-bonded warehouse until such taxes and duties wee paid ib advance. And as that used to sometimes be weeks and weeks, you really wouldn't like the storage charges, never mind it taking a couple of months to import anything.

In short, the system is designed to make low-volume importing feasible, but it incurs costs.

The same logic applies to being notified inadvance. Some sellers might be sophisticated enough to anticipate duties and taxes, but not many are. Consider that costs coming into the UK depend on the exact code (Commodity Code, IIRC, but I'm well rusty on this) and there are tens if not hundreds of thoysands of those codes. Unless the seller goes througha time-consuming pre-clearance process with HMRC, they can't know what code Customs will apply, ad therefore can't know how much to charge you.

And that's just the UK. Is the seller supposed to be an expert in the tax laws and codes of, what, maybe 100+ countries they export to?That's going to mean employing a lot of tax experts, and that will drive up product prices.

One of the reasons I vey rarely import anything is exactly this problem - you're buying a pig in a poke. You don't know the total cost until you're already committed. It almost certainly will be 20% just for VAT but there can be duties, import taxes and of course, courier charges and you'll pay VAT on that as well as on the goods. Import duty can vary from nil, or maybe 2-3% to way, WAY more. I seem to remember a few products costing something like 115%, and I meab 115% duty, not include product cost. Then add VAT, etc. You could be looking at £150+ tax bill on a £138 product.

All I can say otherwise is that I did once, about 20 years ago, fight one such charge .... successfully. And I think it was Fedex.

BUT circumstances were different. I was a journalist and a foreign manufacturer sent me a pretty expensive product, about £1000 IIRC, hoping I'd do a review, but they did it without telling me it was coming. That is, I didn't order the goods. They were unsolicited. And some idiot in the company put the full retail price in the Customs declaration, and didn't specify some nominal value and declare them as sample goods, which they actually were. And I get why .... if they'd said they were worth £10, that's what their insurance would have paid out if things went wrong.

So, I wrone to (I think) Fedex and explained, unsolicited goods not ordered, press review samples, and they were welcome to come and colect the goods for return, but I wasn't paying an invoice o goods I knew nothing about until their driver rang my doorbell. And said nothing about charges arriving 6 weeks later. They cancelled the invoice. But unless it's a goodwill gesture write-off, I doubt they will with you. The only question is whether, if you point blank refuse to pay, they think it's worth pursuing in a court case. And for £50, it isn't but, because of the principle and not setting a precedent (behavioural, not legal precedent) they might well sue.

I was looking at hard drives the other day on Amazon. Their system takes you to a given page for a search on, say, 12TB, and it's sold by Amazon UK. But inside that page you can puck a different size. Pick 8TB (or whatever and it turned out that was imported from Amazon EU, pick 16TB and it was Amazon US (with a clear warning about the buyer being responsible for taxes, if you keep your eyes open for it, and some other capacity was sold by some company I'd never heard of. All were within one single page, just clicking a button for a different capacity and I oh so nearly ended up mportig from the US accidentally. So I get where you're coming from. I just think the only way to not pay it is to refuse and hope they write it off rather than pursue it. But I wouldn't risk it, if it were me.

[lodore]

I suspect you won't want to her this, and I sure as hell sympathise, bt you kinda did contract for it. Just not in the normal way. You contracted, albeit unintentionally (which, arguably, ight make the contract invalid but a judge would need to decide that, IMHO) by importing goods. IANAL but my understandimg is that regardless of whether you have a contract with Fedex or not (and you don't, in the normal sense) tax law says the person contracting the import is responsible for taxes and duties, unless agreed in advance with the seller that the seller is. And that wasn'tdone.

The alternative to copping this kind of admin fee is that when you import, your goods would sit in a customs-bonded warehouse until such taxes and duties wee paid ib advance. And as that used to sometimes be weeks and weeks, you really wouldn't like the storage charges, never mind it taking a couple of months to import anything.

In short, the system is designed to make low-volume importing feasible, but it incurs costs.

The same logic applies to being notified inadvance. Some sellers might be sophisticated enough to anticipate duties and taxes, but not many are. Consider that costs coming into the UK depend on the exact code (Commodity Code, IIRC, but I'm well rusty on this) and there are tens if not hundreds of thoysands of those codes. Unless the seller goes througha time-consuming pre-clearance process with HMRC, they can't know what code Customs will apply, ad therefore can't know how much to charge you.

And that's just the UK. Is the seller supposed to be an expert in the tax laws and codes of, what, maybe 100+ countries they export to?That's going to mean employing a lot of tax experts, and that will drive up product prices.

One of the reasons I vey rarely import anything is exactly this problem - you're buying a pig in a poke. You don't know the total cost until you're already committed. It almost certainly will be 20% just for VAT but there can be duties, import taxes and of course, courier charges and you'll pay VAT on that as well as on the goods. Import duty can vary from nil, or maybe 2-3% to way, WAY more. I seem to remember a few products costing something like 115%, and I meab 115% duty, not include product cost. Then add VAT, etc. You could be looking at £150+ tax bill on a £138 product.

All I can say otherwise is that I did once, about 20 years ago, fight one such charge .... successfully. And I think it was Fedex.

BUT circumstances were different. I was a journalist and a foreign manufacturer sent me a pretty expensive product, about £1000 IIRC, hoping I'd do a review, but they did it without telling me it was coming. That is, I didn't order the goods. They were unsolicited. And some idiot in the company put the full retail price in the Customs declaration, and didn't specify some nominal value and declare them as sample goods, which they actually were. And I get why .... if they'd said they were worth £10, that's what their insurance would have paid out if things went wrong.

So, I wrone to (I think) Fedex and explained, unsolicited goods not ordered, press review samples, and they were welcome to come and colect the goods for return, but I wasn't paying an invoice o goods I knew nothing about until their driver rang my doorbell. And said nothing about charges arriving 6 weeks later. They cancelled the invoice. But unless it's a goodwill gesture write-off, I doubt they will with you. The only question is whether, if you point blank refuse to pay, they think it's worth pursuing in a court case. And for £50, it isn't but, because of the principle and not setting a precedent (behavioural, not legal precedent) they might well sue.

I was looking at hard drives the other day on Amazon. Their system takes you to a given page for a search on, say, 12TB, and it's sold by Amazon UK. But inside that page you can puck a different size. Pick 8TB (or whatever and it turned out that was imported from Amazon EU, pick 16TB and it was Amazon US (with a clear warning about the buyer being responsible for taxes, if you keep your eyes open for it, and some other capacity was sold by some company I'd never heard of. All were within one single page, just clicking a button for a different capacity and I oh so nearly ended up mportig from the US accidentally. So I get where you're coming from. I just think the only way to not pay it is to refuse and hope they write it off rather than pursue it. But I wouldn't risk it, if it were me.

Thanks for the very detailed response. It looks like I will be paying this and will be more careful with purchases going forward as to where the items are coming from.