Tax Free Sales to BFPO Addresses - Who & How?

Lakeland leather offer VAT free delivery to BFPOs - always a winner when the OH loves handbags and purses.

The best thing is you can automatically select to deliver to qualifying BFPOs and the VAT is taken off before you pay.

www.lakelandleather.co.uk

Richer Sounds also has a tax free sales. Need to contact them.

Richer Sounds is an electrical company selling stereo's, tv's etc

Yes, Clarkey you're wasting your hard-earned pennies!

It was a news story on BFBS a couple of weeks ago - a soldier serving overseas (BFG I think) had played online and won, but wasn't allowed to claim his winnings because he wasn't a UK resident (even though he had a UK bank account). What a joke eh.

I think the best bet is to use your UK address when registering and your UK bank account to set up your lottery account. After all if you are a uk tax payer and pay NI as forces personnel do then this is acceptable. what you can't do is register your BFPO address for delivery of mail from camelot. If your bank account is registered at your BFPO address then open an account and register it at your UK address and use that one for your account. That is what i do anyway and it works for me as i receive winnings into my internet account.

Forces_Resources wrote: »

Hi All,

I have a couple of comments for this thread.

Tax free Entitlement
As has already been mentioned, even when serving overseas UK Forces personnel have to pay income tax and NI contributions.
Forces personnel in Germany for example are allowed gods from the UK under an agreement with the German government but there is a bit of paperwork involved.

Amazon for example do refund VAT with just an email after orders have been despatched to a BFPO address, this is the incorrect way to do it but I know from experience it is very welcome when you are out there as Amazon are reliable.

Before I left the army and in the process of setting the business up I cleared an entire VAT free system through customs and immigration out there only to lose thousands when they turned round and told me that I was not entitled to sell things VAT free and quoted regulations that had in front of me and parts of them that didn't exist.

Lottery
BFPO users are not allowed to play the lottery, I have had this out with Camelot and the National Lottery Commission but got nowhere.

I will be offering a National Lottery service in the near future where users can play there line for up to 6 months so they can go away on tour and all winning will be credited to the customers balance. I just have to get it cleared so that I will be doing this in a legal way and therefore winnings will not be withheld.

Sky TV
Believe it or not it is a similar situation with Sky TV. users outside the UK are not allowed to subscribe. This is horrendous when you are based overseas serving your country and if they find out that you took your system outside of the UK as you have been posted overseas they will cancel your account with no hesitation.

Again, I am looking at a way around this as part of our expanding service. This facility may not be in line with Sky's policy but when you are based overseas you don't care, you just want to watch the same TV as everybody else.