Reply To: BattleTech: Mercenaries – CGL does a shipping booboo? Internet rages!

[phaidknott 7251xp 1]

Was just reading the rather insane VAT rules when importing goods from the USA to the UK. NOW the importer (in the USA) has to pay the VAT (20%) when the goods are imported), they can then claim the VAT back from HMRC at the end of the tax year. So if GGL are strapped for cash, it may well be they are delaying the import to the UK until as near to April 5th (so they can claim things back as quickly as possible) as they can. Now this may not be the case, I’m just bouncing things around in my poor old head. But it seems daft that now everyone that attempts to ship goods into the UK has to be VAT registered (with all the paperwork that entails), it used to be the VAT was paid by the customer (at point of delivery). It looks like that system broke down post BREXIT, so HMRC came up with this “workaround”. I was prompted to check when reading on the recent Kurisan article here on BoW, and when going to their website there’s a big caveat for ordering from them to the UK (I was sure they must have got things wrong….but no they didn’t). But I imagine a 20% charge on all the Kickstarter packages is going to be rather large. I also imagine this is going to mess up ALL Kickstarters that try to ship to the UK (you gotta love how BREXIT has royally shafted all the small business owners both here in the UK and now worldwide trying to do business with UK customers). I think it’s also the case that CGL probably didn’t realise that these rules would be in place (the rules had changed AFTER the Clan Invasion Kickstarter and prior to this one) 🙁