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| UK abolishes <£15 VAT free imports. EU to follow. |
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| Fraser:
A well known, and sadly, often true story....... The Plan In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance, And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks." And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell." And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it." And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength." And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong." And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful." And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects." And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy. And this, my friend, is how shit happens. This version of the story was copied from http://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm |
| MK14:
--- Quote from: IanB on January 21, 2021, 10:14:54 pm ---It looks like a complete mess to me. I foresee it being very difficult to buy things from overseas and have them shipped to the UK in the future. Many foreign sellers will decide it's not worth doing the paperwork to comply with the rules. --- End quote --- I massively disagree. A relatively poor and tiny (business wise) seller, who only sells a few dollars of transistors from China. Sells some transistors for £0.10, to someone in the UK. Now, the £0.02 worth of VAT can be collected by him. Ok, there is several pages of horrible paperwork, and they have to make an account on the UK Gov website and it takes them around 30 minutes or a few hours. BUT the UK Gov gets their £0.02 (tuppence). This is completely fair, and means the giant companies like Amazon, Apple, Google etc. Can continue avoiding paying £99,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 in taxes each year. Completely fair :) |
| MK14:
--- Quote from: IanB on January 21, 2021, 10:14:54 pm ---It looks like a complete mess to me. I foresee it being very difficult to buy things from overseas and have them shipped to the UK in the future. Many foreign sellers will decide it's not worth doing the paperwork to comply with the rules. --- End quote --- On a more serious note. I agree with you, completely. I've sort of mentally resigned myself, to probably not buying much, from international markets, such as China. At least until this current situation (VAT/paperwork, not Covid), settles down and hopefully get resolved. I'm a bit annoyed the international supplier is given the duty (ignore pun) of documenting/collecting the VAT and maybe the duties. I suspect this new policy (which seems to really come from the EU, rather than the UK, I suspect). Will back-fire. They want huge amounts of paper work to be filled in, because someone buys a £0.99 pack of small electronics from a small Chinese seller, who is making pennies, or not much more, on each sale. Maybe what would have been much more sensible, is to make the imports completely free of VAT and duties, as long as below some big number, such as £1,000. But, introduce a new paypal/payments-system, charge of some sensible percentage, such as 7.5% of the paypal total costs. If it is outside of the UK (or EU, depending on where you are). Then it would be really easy for everyone. No paper work or anything. Getting the foreign sellers to have to do stuff like paperwork, for the EU/UK tax affairs, on low value items, such as £0.99 is probably not the best of choices. I suspect. |
| mikeselectricstuff:
I still can't see how, when a package arrives in the UK, they can determine whether or not VAT has been paid on it by the shipper. It _could_ in principle be done by the shipper having to register the transaction online when shipped, and get a unique code that gets put on the package as a QR code that's scanned at import, but I suspect they are nowhere near being able to implement that any time soon. But even then it still sets the dangerous precedent that a seller has to register and account seperately to every single country they ship to, which would be a nightmare. |
| Someone:
--- Quote from: IanB on January 21, 2021, 10:14:54 pm ---It looks like a complete mess to me. I foresee it being very difficult to buy things from overseas and have them shipped to the UK in the future. Many foreign sellers will decide it's not worth doing the paperwork to comply with the rules. --- End quote --- Marketplaces (eBay etc) and couriers (as they do already) will take care of the paperwork for small sellers but that cost will be passed on in the total price seen by buyers. Someone has to pay for the tax collecting expenses and the governments have realised it would be a loss making exercise to them so its been hand-balled to the sellers. As people keep repeating, the sensible approach (for everyone other than the bureaucrats employed to do this work) has always been a tax free threshold somewhere between several hundred and several thousand dollarpounds. These disproportionate reporting/documentation requirements artificially increase the cost of small international transactions and entrench the existing models of large distributors (who love their unsubstantiated markups). --- Quote from: MK14 on January 21, 2021, 11:13:36 pm ---This is completely fair, and means the giant companies like Amazon, Apple, Google etc. Can continue avoiding paying £99,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 in taxes each year. --- End quote --- Gotta love their answers in the press about this which always comes back to the doublespeak "we pay exactly the amount of taxes that we have to". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement Completely indecipherable to the general public. |
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