How to Reduce Tax Liability

Many companies will be looking just to pay customs duty and release the goods into free circulation for use or sale at the time of import. However, if there is no free trade agreement or the scope of the agreement does not extend to your products and there are no other tariff reliefs then you may need to look to other processes to reduce the impact of customs duty.

This could be achieved by operating a customs warehouse, where goods are stored without payment of duty, or processing arrangements where goods are imported under duty suspension, processed into a new product and either re-exported or put to free circulation at the duty rate of the finished product.

If the imported product is manufactured from components originally exported, then it may be possible to pay duty on the value excluding these exported parts or materials. This is known as Outward Processing Relief.

Management of such schemes usually requires the use of a duty management system to manage both the stock and the customs data, as well as submitting and related declarations or returns.