A "loophole" that is very cut-and-dried piece of law. If you want companies to pay tax on products, don't set the minimum value threshold to $800. We used to have it at about 45€, then at 22€ and now at 0€. If I need to buy a 5€ adapter from Aliexpress, I pay VAT on it.
That works great until you end up paying more in processing fees than the value of the item.
Or when you pre-pay the tax online when buying an item, the shipper doesn't mark the package correctly and the local post service tells you you have to pay the tax a second time and ask the seller for a refund of the prepaid tax. Of course that involves a long time spent chatting with a CS rep who doesn't seem to understand the problem, and they refuse to refund you for the extra processing fee. (Looking at AliExpress here. Still, don't have much of a choice.)
Or a friend decides to be nice and send you a gift for Christmas but you end up having to pay more in taxes and tax processing fees than the actual value of the gift.
Oh and did I mention the tax here in Norway is 25% of the item value _plus_ the shipping cost?
That is mainly because Norway wants to be special. I have non of these issues but then again my country is part of the one stop shop scheme due to being in the EU.
I already do tho lmao, anything that comes from the US or is shipped with UPS even outside the US is just ridiculous.
6£ ultra pro card deck box from their European website...they try to force people to use UPS shipping for that at 90£ shipping, Belgium warehouse to UK. Ended up not buying because that's just plain ridiculous.
A lot of loopholes are like that. They are clearly legal things that you can do added there for a reason a certain expectation of it to not be abused for different people purposes. They are of course used for different purposes once the landscape changes to allow so.
My favorite legal loophole was in the Ukrainian citizenship law: to naturalize, one has to renounce their previous citizenship(s), but sometimes it's not practically possible to do. When the law was passed, one of legitimate reasons to not follow through with renouncing previous citizenships was "it costs more than X percent of a minimal monthly salary". At some point 30 years later it turns out that, despite X being changed a few times, most the countries that people have to renouncing citizenships of, are falling under this "too expensive" loophole, since minimal monthly salary is a bit of an arbitrary number that a lot of laws refer to and it made sense to have it suppressed. So after kicking the can down the road a few times, the loophole was removed.
> A lot of loopholes are like that. They are clearly legal things that you can do added there for a reason a certain expectation of it to not be abused for different people purposes. They are of course used for different purposes once the landscape changes to allow so.
In this case, the threshold has been updated repeatedly while the use was the same as today. It's not a loophole.
interestingly germany came to the opposite conclusion. many people came from countries that did not allow the renouncement of their citizenship at all. i don't know how big of a factor it was but a year ago the law changed and now germany allows dual citizenship.
Was it? It was a big(in certain circles) discussion point around Brexit, because Germany does allow dual citizenship but only for citizens of other EU countries. Since UK was about to stop being an EU country, there was a question whether dual British-German citizens would have to renounce one of their citizenships. I'm glad they changed it then.
strange. to my understanding renouncing your old citizenship was only ever required when you apply for a new citizenship. once you have acquired the new one while keeping the old one you would not even come into a situation where you would be forced to renounce the old one because no one from those two countries would ever ask you.
other countries might in their visa applications, but they won't challenge your dual citizenship either. the only exception is if you got both as a child, then when you turn 18 you may still have to choose.
yes, but for that there is (I guess) the standard principle -- it's outside of the control of the person being naturalized, so they have a free pass as long as they pinky-promise to not use the other passport for convenience. Same goes for refugees -- it doesn't make sense to ask a persecuted person to fill all the necessary paperwork with the place that persecuted them. That is standard, but Ukraine also had the procedure cost in that list of exception for political reasons.
Nowdays, after the loophole is repealed, the muchhonoured-clearexcelency-mister-chief-of-the-military pushes for some version of dual citizenship where citizens of nice countries can sign a pledge instead of allegiance instead.
Not sure why you're downvoted. It's explicitly a part of American law. It wasn't an accident. It might not be in the US's best interest now (not saying one way or the other) but it's definitely by design! And not in a bad way either; this lowers costs for US consumers.
Yes, this has historically been a nice aspect of living in the U.S. compared to Europe, for those of us who like obscure stuff. Want to order some book only available from an eBay seller in another country? If you're shipping to the U.S., it's easy. If you're shipping to Germany, it's going to get held up in a customs warehouse somewhere. Seems we're going to start getting more of the European experience now.
We had that but online retailers can opt to join a one stop shop scheme and eBay does this via its global shipping program. Which eliminated the vat customs problems but people of course complained since now they never get lucky anymore by dodging taxes
The intention was presumably for people sending one-off things or bringing things with them. The loophole is companies shipping 1000 small packages under the limit instead of one big package over the limit.
No, these are paid by consumers at import time. It's not just a pass-through cost; consumers pay CBP. (I've imported many purchases, both below and above de minimis thresholds. Even the negotiation of which HTS schedule applies to specific items is between CBP and the individual -- the selling company isn't involved at all.)
