Exhorbitant Royal Mail fee for collecting duty on goods from overseas

My wife recently ordered an item of clothing from New Zealand, and expected to have to pay customs duty and/or VAT on it.

It arrived today (when we were out) and a card was left saying that in order to receive it she would have to pay duty of about 9 (fair enough) *PLUS* a Royal Mail handling fee of 8 - making over 17 in all. How can they possibly justify a fee of 8? If postage is underpaid - meaning that someone's slipped up - there is a fee of 1. But in this case, no-one has done anything wrong - it's just the standard way of paying duty COD when buying overseas goods. We've received other things from overseas in the past - delivered by other couriers - and they've just passed on the basic duty charge - so what's with this 8 fee from Royal Mail?

My wife has tried to complain, but has received a right royal run-around. Royal Mail claimed that the fee had been approved by Postcomm (or whatever the regulator is called) and Postcomm claimed it hadn't, and said they'd had lots of complaints. The bloke at the collection office even claimed that they were simply passing on a fee imposed by Customs & Excise despite the Royal Mail website clearly describing it as a "Royal Mail handling fee".

Has anyone else suffered from this, and found an effective way of complaining or - better still - found a way of circumventing this exhorbitant fee?

Reply to
Roger Mills
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I bought an item on Ebay costing about £5 but the sender mistakenly put £50 as its value on the green customs slip. I was charged duty plus the dreaded Royal Mail fee. I wrote to HMRC and explained that the value was a mistake and sent them the Ebay documentation. HMRC refunded the duty and VAT I had paid but Royal Mail refused to even answer my (Recorded Delivery) letters.

Reply to
Alasdair

Perhaps they lost them!

Reply to
Rob.

It's hard to see why Royal Mail should refund anything, it wan't their mistake. The seller is the one who casued the problem. Robert

Reply to
RobertL

But I didn't authorise Royal Mail to pay the money on my behalf either. I could have paid the taxes due direct to HMRC.

Reply to
Alasdair

Could you?

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

I don't think he could, but his point is not entirely unreasonable.

The Royal Mail seem to believe they have a right to take on for themselves the business of dealing with HMRC in collection and handing over any import duties and taxes and then charge what they like for doing so.

On the other hand, I can't think of a better way of dealing with this situation. Even if the consignee is given the option of paying the charges directly himself, Royal Mail still have to withhold the item from delivery, advise the recipient of the incoming package details, and then verify that any taxes have been paid before releasing the package. That is inevitably going to involve them in some costs which they need to recover somehow. If they don't pick up those costs from the package recipient then they're going to have to be shared among all postal users. I don't think that's a very fair approach to take.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Blunt

I don't think that's the only possible way of handling the situation.

For example, instead of withholding the item, they could just deliver it in the normal way, having first taken a copy of the recipient's name and address and of the value indicator coupon. They could then send this information to HMRC who would bill the recipient in due course.

This could be done very cheaply because it's easily automated.

RM could give the recipient, together with the item, a leaflet telling them where to send the money, and how to calculate the amount from the value indicator, so that normally HMRC would not even need to send the recipient an actual bill, they would just wait for payment to arrive by itself.

For this service, RM could charge HMRC a modest fee, perhaps of the order of 20p per item, which HMRC in turn would fund from what they charge the recipients.

HMRC would then have an automated system whereby reminders would be sent if payment is not forthcoming within, say, 2 weeks, adding a small fine for needing to send the reminder, and a huge fine if the bill remains unpaid for an unreasonable period.

How do other carriers (e.g. couriers) handle this sort of thing? How do the postal services of other countries do it?

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

We bought something from USA a while ago on which duty was payable. This was delivered to us by a courier (can't remember which one - but * not* Royal Mail) and we had to pay the duty to them before they would part with it. But, as far as I can remember, it was *just* the duty - not inflated by a massive 'handling charge'.

I imagine that HMRC insist that the duty is paid *before* the item is delivered - since this gives the recipient a much greater incentive to pay!

Reply to
Roger Mills

That would be a nice solution, but I can see there would be a lot of problems with people not paying HMRC after taking delivery of the goods. It would be almost impossible to ensure that the consignee actually lived at the delivery address, and HMRC would have great difficulty in getting their hands on the money due. That would lead them to pressure the delivery carrier to go back to a system of withholding delivery pending payment of charges.

In my experience the express delivery companies such as FedEx and DHL require payment of taxes upon delivery, at least where private individuals are concerned.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Blunt

"Almost impossible"? I don't think so. The item is associated with a particular address, and someone there will accept the parcel and sign for it. That should be enough to prosecute if necessary.

It should work well in the vast majority of cases. Where people try to dodge payment by using schemes such as addressing the parcel to a bogus "lodger", signing on "his" behalf, and subsequently denying all knowledge, I imagine the authorities will soon find ways to get on top of the situation. In extremis it might involve some nontrivial detective work, but then a few high profile stories of successfully making an example of dodgers should provide adequate disincentive to would-be non-payers.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

"Chris Blunt" wrote

That's not our experience recently with FedEx (private individual case)...

Twice this year they have delivered an item from abroad, then a week or two later sent a bill in the post for VAT and a handling charge (c. 6 or 7). The VAT was based on the original value of goods+postage (ie *including* the actual cost of postage from abroad) PLUS an addition for a notional amount of postage!

When this was pointed out to them (ie they were charging VAT on postage twice), each time they have cancelled the entire bill.

Reply to
Tim

Slightly off at a tangent but I remember a time in my younger, more naive, days when I'd successfully ordered cigarettes via mail order from Luxembourg.

Mega cheap, of course.

Half a dozen packages arrived but the seventh got intercepted and I had to pay a visit to my local sorting office to pay a fee to release the goods that my Government had impounded. The fees weren't an issue BTW, I'd got six packages through so had made several times the value of the fees.

But I digress.

Me: I've come to collect this parcel (handing over the card) RM employee (having studied the card and eyeing me up and down like a criminal): ok, there's a fee to pay Me: sure, is a cheque ok? RM employee: with a cheque guarantee card yes Me (writing cheque): here you go RM employee: ok, once the cheque's cleared which is ten days, you can have the goods Me: hang on, the cheque's guaranteed RM employee: yeah but we have instructions to keep these sort of goods until the cheque's cleared Me: what sort of goods RM employee: ones flagged by HMCE Me: but it's guaranteed, see, I've written all my card details on the back RM employee: but until it clears I can't release the goods

I think it was at that very point that I realised RM employ monkeys............

Reply to
Juan Kerr

I bought an item from the US on eBay costing £38, but the sender was mistakenly advised by USPS to put the MRP of £75 on the customs slip. As the 3.5% duty was under the HMRC £7 waive point, I was not charged duty, VAT and consequently no RM fee. I had incorrectly factored in to my bid that I would be charged, so I ended up with an absolute bargain (and to hell with the air-miles if that's what it takes to beat rip off Britain !)

Funny old world. innit !?

Daytona

Reply to
Daytona

You do the RM employee an injustice. The cheque is only guaranteed if the payee writes the card number on the back of the cheque. As you wrote the number there was no guarantee. See

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Reply to
Monty L

In message , Ronald Raygun wrote

Have you seen postal charges recently! It would cost more than 20p to mail HMRC the information

£8 probably is equivalent to around 15minutes work (including overheads) so the charge isn't unreasonable. Try getting your local plumber or electrician out for 15 minutes and see what it costs.
Reply to
Alan

In message , Ronald Raygun wrote

You assume that people don't move on a regular basis. In some areas of my local town the bed-sit and rented property sector has a very high churn rate.

Why go to all this trouble when the tax can be paid and the resulting small fee collected before the item is handed over?

Reply to
Alan

HMRC are noty at liberty to spend the money they collect. They are funded from a fixed budget set by crooked Politicians and all proceeds gathered go straight to the treasury.

So do it oline

Reply to
Simon

In message , Simon wrote

That will be another couple of hundred million pound of expenditure to get software that is compatible between the two organisations :(

Reply to
Alan

But that wouldn't have prevented the RM employee from writing the card number on the cheque as well.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Blunt

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