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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Denmark. Recently there had been a crack down on VAT dodging on purchases from outside the eu (read China).

If your package gets picked, there is a ~$20 administrative fee charged ontop of the 25% VAT. Most people are pretty ok paying VAT, but the implementation in this case is ridiculous.

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Only $20? That actually seems quite reasonable for being caught avoiding taxes. In theory, it should be possible to declare and pay VAT in advance, but I have never figured out how.

Anyway, the penalty used to be much more. I've payed over 300dkk on a 100dkk item years ago.

Amazon.com offers to take care of import taxes for you, and many of the dodgy Chinese sites offers tax-insurance.

If it's the same as here in Switzerland, then it is not about "being caught." It's not a fine. It's a fee. Even if you declare your goods and pay taxes, it costs you a fee every time they check your package.

That might be quite likely.

PostNord operates Denmark as well I think? They’ve brought in the same thing here in Sweden, a 75kr “admin fee” effectively for just handling the VAT processing

Yes - they had some issues delivering packages on time before, then they were basically flooded by a tidal wave of cheap direct import trinkets from China. China somehow has free postage to the rest of the world and eventually people caught on.

For some value of "just".

They have to hold the package in storage, check the invoice and declare the goods, wait for the approval and then take it out of storage for final shipping. The storage bit requires a paper trail (soon to be electronic in Sweden).

If you do the declaration yourself, they still have to hold it in storage and write it off with the customs ID you provide, which is likely more work in the end.

So in any case, a non-trivial amount of labor is involved. And since it's not covered by the Universal Postal Union, they're not obliged to do it at a loss.

Postnord was created when the Danish postal service bought the Swedish one.

Unfortunately, the Danish postal service sucks and hence we now have crappy service.

Other way around. The Swedish state owns 60% of the merger whereas the Danish state owns 40%. Also, the Swedish postal service already sucked even before the merger, but the Danish postal service was a really dumb deal and a money hole, so the merger definitely didn't improve things for anyone.

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