We’d like to remind Forumites to please avoid political debate on the Forum.
This is to keep it a safe and useful space for MoneySaving discussions. Threads that are – or become – political in nature may be removed in line with the Forum’s rules. Thank you for your understanding.
📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!
fedex duty charge on 35 dollar gift
tifrap_2
Posts: 23 Forumite
A couple of days ago I got a completely unexpected bill from Fedex for £19.46
As I had never used fedex it came as a surprise.
It turns out that a christmas present from a relative in texas had caught the attention of HM Revenue and had duty charged on it of 9.46 - to which fedex had added a £10 fee for covering the duty charge at the port.
The contents of the package, my present, was a 35 dollar shirt
which converts to £21.72 worth of pressie.
thinking £20 duty on a £22 item a bit rich I decided to look into it before I complained.
It seems that when a comercial item comes in from outside the EU both the value of the item and the cost of the postage is used to calculate the duty - so the intrinsic value of the package was declared as £63.11 (35.88 plus vat for postage).
I also noticed that there are two exemptions from duty - one of under £18 for commercial transactions and another of under £36 for gifts.
Looking at how fedex had declared the package - I noticed that they had used a customs procedure code (cpc) of CPC 40 00 004 which is a plain import code.
where they should have used a CPC 40 00 C08 which is used to declare a gift below the £36 limit. (CPC 40 00 C07 is used to declare a value below the £18 duty threshold by the way).
So I phoned Fedex (avoiding the 0845 number - thank you moneysavingexpert) expecting a fight.
But no - the exceptionaly polite person on the other end listened to what I had to say, then said that the amounts satisfied the 'gift' criteria, but that the package should have been declared as a gift by the sender - I began my excuses, suggesting that they probably had done that verbally but as there was some confusion at the time of sending, blah blah....
Before I could finish, he said that Fedex would cancel the bill!
And he did. just like that.
So the moral of the story - make sure that your relatives know to declare gifts as 'gifts'.
And that the value of the gift should be below £36 to avoid a sudden ramp up of charges and duty.
Whether or not the value of a gift is the price that they paid for it, or the price they could get for reselling it, or even the amount they think your friendship is worth, I wouldn't like to say
Almost forgot to say that Fedex have gone up in my estimation because of this - so the £19.46 they wrote off was well spent on customer relations in my opinion.
As I had never used fedex it came as a surprise.
It turns out that a christmas present from a relative in texas had caught the attention of HM Revenue and had duty charged on it of 9.46 - to which fedex had added a £10 fee for covering the duty charge at the port.
The contents of the package, my present, was a 35 dollar shirt
which converts to £21.72 worth of pressie.
thinking £20 duty on a £22 item a bit rich I decided to look into it before I complained.
It seems that when a comercial item comes in from outside the EU both the value of the item and the cost of the postage is used to calculate the duty - so the intrinsic value of the package was declared as £63.11 (35.88 plus vat for postage).
I also noticed that there are two exemptions from duty - one of under £18 for commercial transactions and another of under £36 for gifts.
Looking at how fedex had declared the package - I noticed that they had used a customs procedure code (cpc) of CPC 40 00 004 which is a plain import code.
where they should have used a CPC 40 00 C08 which is used to declare a gift below the £36 limit. (CPC 40 00 C07 is used to declare a value below the £18 duty threshold by the way).
So I phoned Fedex (avoiding the 0845 number - thank you moneysavingexpert) expecting a fight.
But no - the exceptionaly polite person on the other end listened to what I had to say, then said that the amounts satisfied the 'gift' criteria, but that the package should have been declared as a gift by the sender - I began my excuses, suggesting that they probably had done that verbally but as there was some confusion at the time of sending, blah blah....
Before I could finish, he said that Fedex would cancel the bill!
And he did. just like that.
So the moral of the story - make sure that your relatives know to declare gifts as 'gifts'.
And that the value of the gift should be below £36 to avoid a sudden ramp up of charges and duty.
Whether or not the value of a gift is the price that they paid for it, or the price they could get for reselling it, or even the amount they think your friendship is worth, I wouldn't like to say
Almost forgot to say that Fedex have gone up in my estimation because of this - so the £19.46 they wrote off was well spent on customer relations in my opinion.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Confirm your email address to Create Threads and Reply
Categories
- All Categories
- 351.7K Banking & Borrowing
- 253.4K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
- 454K Spending & Discounts
- 244.7K Work, Benefits & Business
- 600.1K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
- 177.3K Life & Family
- 258.4K Travel & Transport
- 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
- 16.2K Discuss & Feedback
- 37.6K Read-Only Boards