Readers’ letter: Hungarian Post Office double-taxing some EU origin packages

I am writing to you concerning a possible systemic error at the Hungarian Post Office concerning how they determine the country of origin for postal packages arriving in Hungary. This information is used by NAV to determine tax and duty liabilities, if any. As a result of this error, postal recipients may be incorrectly charged for duties and/or taxes they do not owe.

I stumbled upon this problem recently when an item I ordered from a company in Italy was delivered by our postman with a bill for nearly 6000 forint, which represented 27% VAT. I was surprised, as I was under the impression that Italy was also in the EU, and I had already paid 22% VAT when I purchased the item via eBay.

When I inquired why I was being asked to pay this money, I was told by the post office that it was because the item was shipped from Switzerland. After I insisted the package originated in Italy, I was told that as far as the post office was concerned, it originated in Italy because the postal tracking number ended in “CH,” which is the country code for Switzerland. The fact that the package was cleared marked “Community Goods” and “EU — Origin” and “ITALY” didn’t seem to have any impact on the post office. All they were interested in was the two-letter country code at the end of the tracking number.

I found this to be quite interesting, and decided to investigate further. A little online research took me to the web site of the Universal Postal Union, which is the organization responsible for the international tracking number standard, which is called “UPU S10, Identification of postal items – 13-character identifier.” It explains in excruciating detail all the components that make up the familiar international tracking numbers we see on most packages, including information on the country codes.

I also found an older version of this standard from 2003, which contained slightly different information about country codes. It is this critical difference that I believe is responsible for the errors the post office is making.