how much?

I appear to have been the victim of a massive cock-up.

I buy figures directly from Japan. They are expensive things, but the site I use sells them at good value and I’m happy to take the VAT charges on the chin for importing them.

Two figures were recently dispatched to me.  Because they have had to be put in a big box (both are together, where I was originally expecting each individually) they’ve had to upgrade the postage to EMS, which is a tracked service and is quicker, but a lot more expensive.

I mention this because the figures are only about £50 each and the new postage cost is about £30.  I’m obviously converting from yen, but the upshot is that the total cost is about £130.  At worst case we’re talking £150.

This is important because customs charges only kick in for items that cost above £135.  Below that you only pay VAT and even above it they waive it if the charge is less than £9.  I’ve never paid customs charges, only VAT.

VAT is at 20% so I was expecting a charge of around £26 and then the (extortionate) parcel force handling fees would take it up to about £40.

The bill arrived yesterday - it is for £273.68

Thy want to charge me £57.39 for customs and £202.79 for VAT.

Those numbers are bigger than the original value of the items + postage!

I have absolutely no clue how that has happened, but I figure one of a few things might be the source of the problem - the original forms were not filled out properly, so they’ve done the calculations based on wrong numbers, or perhaps they’ve fucked up the yen to pounds conversion, but what is definitely the case is someone's made a huge mistake somewhere.

Unfortunately, this now gives me the horrible problem of having to work out who’s make the mistake, how I get it corrected, who I have to deal with to do that and all sorts.

There’s a form you can download on the customs site, but they want me to send the bits of paper you get with the parcel.  Well, I can’t send those until I’ve got the parcel, and I can’t get the parcel without paying and I’m not paying £275 for a parcel whose contents cost me £130.

Particularly since I can’t afford £275.

Of course there’s an added problem - parcel force say they will only hold onto the parcel for 20 days (and that was about 4 days ago).  Can I get this sorted in 20 days?  Do I think HMRC will even look at the form in 20 days?

Marvellous.