Calculating Import VAT/Duty

Martynt74

Martynt74

Martynt74

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Joined
20 Feb 2004
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Location
Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
I'm a little baffled by UPS and wonder if anyone can explain to my donkey brain. I tried ringing UPS but their answer didn't seem to make much sense.

Item value is started as $250 USD

The Invoice has an FX rate of 0.806972000 and so that works out at a GBP value of £201.74. Adding 20% to that creates a VAT amount of around £40.


The breakdown on my UPS sheet is

Import VAT - £57.23
Duties - £9.97
Brokerage Fee - £12.20
Total - £79.40

Can anyone help me understand how they've got £57.23 as the VAT value? I've used a few import calculators which seem to match more in line with my original calculations.

For clarification, i've already paid the invoice as didn't want to delay the delivery, and the initial request for payment didn't break it down so i just assumed there were hefty "admin" fees.
 
It looks like someone took the $250 and direct translate it to £250, add on brokeage fee and Duty and took a VAT of all that....which still would be about £54.
 
Last edited:
Raymond Lin said:
It looks like someone took the $250 and direct translate it to £250, add on brokeage fee and Duty and took a VAT of all that....which still would be about £54.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but still not quite there, i also wondered if they'd ballsed up the conversion to turn turn $250/0.8 to get £300, but that still doesn't seem to work. If i could at least work out what they've done it'd help me mentally but at the moment, everything i try doesn't get back to the £57.23
 
It will be calculated as:

VAT% x (£ value of goods + freight costs + customs duty)

Freight charge is not the charge you pay, it's generally a fixed amount based on weight of goods unless the goods are explicitly marked as CIF. If you want to weep at the complexity feel free to read this:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/delivery-costs-to-include-in-the-customs-value

Note - my import knowledge is nearly 20 years old so I may be out of touch!
 
Good luck getting any sense out of UPS for import billing and refunds. They did the same to us and couldn't refund the amount as they had already paid it on our behalf in advance, so on the next shipment in we rejected the invoice stating they had incorrectly applied duty to a product and we wouldn't pay their invoice until it had been corrected. It went on for months and eventually they "released" the goods to us, and passed on the unpaid duty to a debt collection agency. I can pass on a few email addresses and numbers we used to try and chase it up but be prepared for them to be completely useless or lie to you. The debt collection agency were very helpful when we supplied them with the evidence to show UPS had taken responsibility for fixing the issue then didn't resolve it.
 
Cheers guys, i think i might send a brief email to try and get some sense from it, but then just write it off given it's only around £15 more than i would've expected it to be. I don't think it's worth too much time battling it out!
 
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