Another learning experience Part III

Well, the email to DHL, providing them with the same evidence HMRC need to process a refund produced the following reply:

We would like to take this opportunity to advise you that the Advance payment / Disbursement fee is applied to those customers who do not operate their own deferment account with HM Revenue & Customs or those who do not wish to authorise us to use their deferment account.

The amount is for advance payments of money that we have lodged with Customs, in order to enable the clearance of those shipments which attract import charges.
The £11.00 is a minimum fee and this increases to 2.5% of the outlay when greater than £440.00.

If you have your own deferment account, then you can authorise DHL to use it for future shipments.

If you are proposing that we should use DHL’s deferment account on future shipments then this fee will be applicable.

It is the shipper’s and importer’s responsibility to look into what charges will be levied on import of shipments.

Unfortunately we are unable to refund you this charge.

Please let us know if you need more assistance.

While this explains how their charges are arrived at, it did not address my particular issue that the VAT was not due on my package. Feeling aggrieved, I sent them a reply addressing the points they had made and ended by telling them that I am not a satisfied customer.

A few days later I received an email from a named individual, not the generic mailbox.

Thank you for your email, which has been passed to me to review.

I have checked the commercial invoice sent by Amazon, and they have stated under description of goods ‘Orchard View’  rather than Book – Orchard View, however they did state a Harmonised tariff code for ‘book’, which should have been picked up by our imports team.

I have advised our collection team to release the shipment without payment, and we will cancel the charges and reclaim them directly from HMRC.

Please accept my apologies for this error.

I am concerned that the writer thinks it is just a matter of waiving charges rather than effecting a refund, so I have sent an email thanking them for looking into this matter and asked for the refund to be sent to my credit card.

Of course, another matter raised in the above email is that CreateSpace, who sent the package, did not label it correctly, so I will contact them and let them know about the problems I have been having because it is something which likely affects a lot of people.