Comment by Reason077
8 hours ago
> "Paid the fee online, 20% VAT + a few pounds of handling fees ... It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020."
Why don't Amazon and other online retailers just charge you the UK VAT when you order and ship it "VAT paid", so it doesn't get held up at the border?
That's how it works in New Zealand. You pay New Zealand's GST when you place an order, not after it arrives. Any online retailer that ships over a certain volume of products to New Zealand is required to implement this.
This is exactly how it works in the UK for purchases worth £135 or less which are shipped directly from outside the UK. The retailer has to charge UK VAT as if it were a domestic sale at the point of sale, and there is then nothing to pay at customs so no hold-up for that. It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.
On top of that, Amazon and other large online retailers also have a huge distribution and warehouse network domestically in the UK already so for higher value items mostly they import themselves to their warehouses before sale and then sales are purely domestic.
> ”It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.”
But why only under £135? This seems like an arbitrary number, and a very low limit.
Strangely, if I order from Amazon UK to Finland in the EU, the VAT is already all included and it comes directly to me, no customs. Even for some third party sellers too.
It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.
The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
VAT is not really all that complicated and accounts for around 15% of the UK tax take. Moving that to income tax would mean a substantial redistribution from working people to pensioners and incentivise moving more production abroad.
Import taxes are pretty complicated but unilaterally removing them would mean we would have nothing to negotiate tariff free access to foreign markets.
Vat is stupidly complex. Try doing an international conference for example. Not to mention the impact on imports as the OP discovered.
Quite why people think tax stays in one place is beyond me - all costs are passed on and tax is no different. Putting the tax on employer NiCS for example would result in roughly the same business collection and payment, but with a significant reduction in administration and the tax gap since PAYE collection is more efficient.
And quite why obtaining foreign items more expensive is seen as a negotiating point could only be brought up by somebody who hasn’t thought through how floating exchange rates work. We want more stuff coming in and less going out. That’s how you win in international trade. Exports are a cost remember.
As we see from the US, it is the local population that pays the cost of import tariffs and taxes. The currency exchange rate fixes the rest.