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Comment by MagnumOpus | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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...

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

> 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.

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