Crazy high charge from TNT/Fed-ex month after delivery

Ectoshred

I set up a new business last year and have been ordering shirts from Turkey. Usual cost is around £3K, and I get a £30 customs bill from TNT (on top of shipping fee)
This time I bought around £4K worth of stock, and my TNT bill has come to around £1800! That is almost 50%. Some of it is claiming to be VAT bill but I paid the tax to the company I bought the shirts from. I have emailed them asking for an explanation but they haven't responded yet. Surely this can't be correct!
Image of invoice received: https:// imgur.com/BlqS5jE
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Lomast

You have to pay import duty and vat on anything you import from outside the eu. How you have been getting away with £30 I'm not sure

martindow

I can't make your invoice open - can you give us the figures?  As Lomast says they are correct to charge you VAT and possibly duty but 1800 does sound high on a value of 3000 - 600 VAT plus duty and clearance fees is going to be around 700 I would think.  I can only imagine that previous shipments were drastically under-declared in value to pay only 30.

Lomast

We need to know the declared value and shipping cost but they are charging
Duty 588.70
Vat 1100.17
Clearance fee 84.44

J_B

martindow said:

I can't make your invoice open

https://imgur.com/BlqS5jE

martindow

Thanks for the link.  Could it be that the shipment has been declared in Lira and the carrier has taken this figure as Pounds?  I think about 8 Lira = 1 Pound so your VAT and and duty would be 8 times higher than they should be.

The duty charge is about half the VAT which implies that the duty is around 10%.  That is much higher than I've usually been charged for different items. You can check what the percentage should be here

https://www.gov.uk/trade-tariff

If the carrier has made a currency error dispute the bill and ask them to recalculate.

doningtonphil

When you received the TNT/Fedex invoice did you also receive all of the supporting paperwork ie the Customs Invoice created by the sender and also their calculation sheets?
It is possible they have miscalculated and used wrong currency as suggested.  We import from Australia and the invoice stated 'dollars' and the Import team at Northampton assumed USD rather than AUD and calculated accordingly