News Forum - Thai customs to impose VAT on all postal imports

[Thaiger]

The Customs Department of Thailand next month is set to begin levying value-added tax (VAT) on all imported goods sent through postal services, regardless of the items’ value. This move comes in response to low-priced imports from China that have been flooding the market, providing an unfair edge as domestic producers are taxed. Currently, imported … …

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[Fanta]

The corruption will be epic in scale. The goods are prepaid, the Customs Office assigns an inflated value & demands VAT payment, the purchaser either pays the tax or the goods are seized and auctioned off to ”interested” third parties. 

[MrStretch]

This massive influx of low-priced goods presents a significant challenge for customs officials, as it would require a substantial amount of time to open each box for tax assessment, as proposed by the Finance Ministry. As a result, officials are now contemplating suitable methods for collecting tax on these low-priced goods

If they are going to saddle Thai Post with this collection, then an obvious method would be for the package and the recipient to each have a receipt for payment, and the VAT is collected from whichever receipt amount is higher.

In the past, when purchasing something from overseas, the vendor (Amazon, for instance would collect the estimated duty) or the shipper (FedEx, DHL, etc.) would collect the duty imposed before delivering.  I can't see any other way that is even remotely efficient, without opening to corruption possibilities, as Fanta said.

[butterfly]

even aliexpress has pre-paid VAT for shipments to EU,

not sure why it's not for Thailand

probably because Thailand doesn't have such a system to deal with online overseas vendors

too difficult to implement for them

and they don't probably don't trust external vendors to collect that VAT

when they can do it here with the PostOffice