Car Duty

[jimpres]

Anyone ship a new car to Poland from the US?
I shipped on and they are trying to charge 50% duty on a $30K car.

No where on the internet do I find such a discussion.

Jim

[varsovian]

Sell it and buy a new one in Poland - much easier.

[usenetposts]

> Anyone ship a new car to Poland from the US?
> I shipped on and they are trying to charge 50% duty on a $30K car.
>
> No where on the internet do I find such a discussion.
>
> Jim

Hmmn. This is a good example of the value of doing one's homework prior to
sending goods into the EU.

I don't know if these are the current tariffs, but in the 90s what used to
happen is that if you had a passenger car the first thing would be the customs
duty. Of course we no longer have this in the EU, but for cars coming on from
outside this could be around 15%.

So if you have a car worth 10,000 USD according to the invoice you show at
customs clearance (I know yours is three times more, but this is to keep tabs
on the add-ons, and see what they come to, and let's say for the sake of
argument that you paid 2000 USD to ship that car over) then they will add that
on and charge 1800 which is 15% of 12000. Then they take the excise duty, which
might be 20%, out of the 13800, which adds on 2760. That makes the basis for
22% VAT 16560, and the gross price 20203.20 USD. Over double the value it had
in the US.

If you only have to pay 50% more, then that's pretty lucky. Probably the
customs duty tariff went down a bit - or maybe they haven't told you about the
VAT yet - you don't get that back on a passenger car.

The strategy to reduce tax when importing a vehicle from outside the EU is to
include it as "aport rzeczowy" for a company and try to get customs-free that
way, and make sure it classes as a van, so that the VAT comes back. If it is a
used car under a certain value (which used to be 8000 eur but I haven't done
one of these for ages and ages because people simply stopped importing cars
from outside Europe) then that is all you are left with.

But if the car is already here onthe customs territory it's likely to be a bit
late for that now.

A good tax advisor is in our officer, and if people need tax related help it's
worth shelling out a few bucks for an hour of his time, and not be in a
situation where you could lose over 15,000 USD, as in this case.

[usenetposts]

What became of this in the end then?