I have spoken with Lorraine just now in our Duty & VAT team and she has advised that in order for us to work on this we would need an amended commercial invoice not a pro forma invoice showing the amount paid for the goods and freight.
I don't have these Nick and I wouldn't know how to go about getting them. I have spoken with HMRC just now and the chap said you work to guidelines - so a small box with a relatively cheap flash inside you've managed to price up as £83.80 shipping. How this conclusion and how your guidelines work I'm not sure but I would expect to ship a live elephant for that amount.
HMRC informed me that it's DHL that my issue is with - not Customs. I signed for the item without notice of your crazy charges. Yes I can pay it and then dispute it with HMRC and get some tax back, or I can simply deal with DHL about the payment. HMRC were surprised by the figure you calculated.
I'm absolutely not interested in jumping through your hoops - why don't YOU contact the seller / shipping agent or whomever to figure the true cost - why do I have to do this to rectify your vast miscalculation.
I have work to do and this is a total waste of time - I can either refuse to pay the charge in which case I am in dispute with DHL and their GROSS miscalculation which I will proudly mock using my fine artistic talents, or I can retrospectively refuse to accept the item which I signed for but did not agree to the incorrect customs charges. If I had been presented with this information at the time, I would have refused the item and it would have been returned to sender and I could have purchased a different flash and hope such a unique error wouldn't occur again.
Sadly that time of course has passed - refusing the obscenely over-the-top freight estimation and getting my money back from the seller so I didn't have all this hassle with DHL. What I can do is tell you that I'm refusing it NOW - and you are free to pick it up. Either return it to whomever or do with it as you will. But I am not spending hours of my time to sort out an obvious error that DHL made. If you'd been realistic, any person in their right mind knows that a small box doesn't cost £83.80 to ship unless it's some super global express, which it wasn't - then we'd all be happy and I'd pay a small customs charge happily. I don't agree with how you've charged me without notice so I couldn't refuse the item, I don't enjoy the fact it's taken over 2 weeks to get a response. I don't like being told I need to do your work when I have my own to do. And all this for a cheap chinese flash.
I have no dispute with HMRC and that was made clear to me. My dispute is with the people who foolishly grossly over-cooked the freight charges and paid them on my behalf without informing me. I have no idea if DHL has a process for refusing items and I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply retrospectively when a month after receiving the item I'm presented with an incorrect customs charge. I don't know who signed for this or what drugs they were on - maybe they were looking at a bigger box marked 'small elephant' and there was a mix up - but no one with any common sense would agree that the freight charge you estimated was anything other than grossly incorrect for a regular small boxed item.
So to sum up - I'm not paying the charges. All I can do is give you the item for you to destroy (hey, it's a cheap chinese flash - no big deal) so you may regain charges paid to HMRC on my behalf which you had no right to do given the gross miscalculation.
Where we go from here I'm not sure but beware the freelance artist!
All the best,
Jimmy Storey