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Currently shipments up to € 22 do not need to be declared, but the order will change soon. July 1, there will be no VAT rebate on imports, which means that even lower value shipments with goods from third countries will be taxed.
For example, a phone case you ship from China will cost 21 percent more. on the adjusted rate of VAT on imports. Also, you may have to pay more for the services of a customs broker.
It is true that if you do not want to pay the customs broker, you can declare the shipment yourself – the Customs Department is committed to establishing a self-service declaration system. However, on July 1. right here, and how the system will work and whether it will work at all remains unclear. There is another problem: self-declaration is quite a complex process that will require special knowledge.
“The consignee declaring the shipment must provide the code of the merchandise in accordance with the international classification and is responsible for ensuring that the description and the purchase code correspond. In addition, the code changes depending on the properties of the product, the material it is made from, etc. This code is used to calculate import taxes, excise duties, tax benefits ”, says Enrika Naujokė, director of the Customs Association. Practitioners (MPA).
There is a huge “traffic jam”
As long as the start date and operating principles of the new system remain unclear, shippers do not know how to understand that the buyer has already self-declared the merchandise and that the shipment can be delivered from the warehouse.
“It is very unfortunate, but the Customs Department is reluctant to cooperate, negotiate or at least listen to companies that work directly with shipments. So far, we have no real knowledge of how the new declaration system works. The department released technical specifications for the system in January, but has since modified them more than once.
Therefore, it is very likely that July 1. the system itself may not work, or the company may not be able to adapt its systems to it, ”says rasa Čėsnienė, director of the Association of Express Parcel Carriers.
Both cases do not promise anything good to the population, because July 1. Something similar to the recent traffic jam in the Suez Canal could happen: due to increased taxes and the need to declare, shipments will start to get stuck in warehouses as purchases from abroad will travel faster than expected. declared and delivered to the country. buyer.
The companies forecast that the load in the warehouses will increase from a few to several dozen times. And such a warehouse load will automatically reflect the final price of shipments, which will already be increased by VAT and the services of a customs agent.
Additional costs in a flat place
Unless major changes occur, starting July 1. the number of declarations made by the end of the year will increase by millions. Only automated systems can cope with that traffic. In preparation for the changes, companies have started to implement them, but here too they have to face strange requirements from the Customs Department. One of them rašas the description of each new product must be translated into Lithuanian.
“In our opinion, declaring low-value shipments should be as simple and fast as possible, as this would make the service cheaper for the final recipient. But now someone will have to translate the descriptions and make sure they match the product code, so machine translation services like Google Translate and more won’t be enough. This creates a level playing field for unnecessary costs, which will drive up already high prices for services.
It seems that the code should be sufficient; after all, it is an international and understandable brand and, for example, Estonian customs perfectly handles the English descriptions, which are only an auxiliary source of information about the product, ”says R. Čėsnienė. .
According to her, the more requirements, the more the buyer will pay for the shipment. Unfortunately, the Customs Department does not seem to take this aspect into account and residents will have to pay more for excessive regulation.
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