The European Commission has called on the United Kingdom to shoulder the financial consequences of its infringements of EU rules on customs duty and value-added tax (VAT).
Readers may recall that according to an OLAF report from 2017, importers (mainly from China) evaded considerable amounts of customs duty by using false invoices and presenting incorrect import value declarations. Other controls carried out by the Commission showed a considerable increase in the scale of this mechanism of fraud by under-evaluation, using the platform in the UK between 2011 and 2017.
It called upon the United Kingdom to take appropriate risk control measures, but nothing was done, costing the EU budget €2.7 billion (not including collection costs) over this period.
Furthermore, the UK also broke the EU rules on VAT, which is likely to lead to losses for the EU budget.
The Commission has therefore decided to send the UK a letter of formal notice, on the grounds that it is refusing to make customs duty available to the EU budget, as required by EU law. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)