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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

How in the hell is HMRC going to enforce this? Beyond confiscating shipments from sellers who refuse to cooperate (in which case they are punishing the consumer just as much), they can't do much, can they?

This will only punish small and honest sellers. Big ones will maneuver around the bureaucracy and the unscrupulous ones will just ignore it.

Sometimes I seriously wonder if people in the government can really be this dense, because this level of stupidity can only be explained as malice.

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Hmrc has lots of experience and a big setup to extract their 20% from shipments from outside the EU that didn’t pay customs/excise/VAT.

So they are well prepared to confiscate your package sent to the UK until you pay up.

(And your courier/Royal Mail will charge you another £8 for the hassle just to rub it in.)

Can't they use the experience and the setup to collect the 20% themselves then instead of whatever this is?

Ok so what you are saying is that non-compliant packages are intercepted and the vat is charged at customs.

Then I ask again, what is the point of this legislation and why would an overseas seller be motivated to bother with it?

It's the customer who has to deal with the hassle in the end anyway.

I'd imagine they'd then have to deal with a lot of returns/chargebacks, from customers refusing to pay to accept the goods.

Simpler to just refuse to deal with the UK.

The big issue I see with this is that the new rules do not mandate any kind of identification on packages that have the VAT already paid, so they can't identify VAT-unpaid packages.

And as the seller is now responsible for VAT for B2C consignments under £135, I'm unsure if they can extract the 20% from the recipient anyway.

I'm guessing that at least for now this means everything valued under £135 is going to go straight through, and they'll implement something sane later...

> Royal mail will charge you another £8

Something similar happened to me. On top of the £8 charge, I had to drive 30 miles to the depot to pay the charge. The Royal Mail refused to deliver it.

I don't know about the HMRC, but fundamentally this sounds like when you ordered from the US to Germany, though with less burdons for the seller. The seller would have to declare any package sent to Germany. Customs would intercept all packages and check their declaration. Packages which appeared to have no commercial goods were just passed on, those which were subjected to taxation would be sent to local customs offices, where one would have to drive to and pay the duties and pick up the package. That was a major pain in the ass for ordering abroad. This got moderately better by big delivery companies like FedEX and DHL collecting the taxes on delivery, saving a trip to the customs office. Sometimes packages escaped the attention of the customs, one shop in the US I had ordered from had declared it a $20 valued "gift". Also often packages would be controlled for illegal content. Sounds like this is another disastrous consequence of brexit.

Declaring is for import duties, vat is on top of that and also applies to services

For both. When you order things from outside of the EU, you have to pay VAT in Germany too. So the declaration also impacts the VAT due.

If the tax payments are made yearly, then individual packages are not at risk. Presumably a company could do a year of trade before the UK government starts asking where their slice is.

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