After two weeks of sending emails up and down with customs and calling the shipper to resolve an unlawful charge, we’re finally going to receive our shipment from the US. Apparently last month the customs did an update of their system and 4 year old incorrect data of companies became the main data. We had to sign a document with an address where we were located 4 years ago, so we made them aware that we have all customs documentation and import permits and this is totally incorrect. After sending reminder mails and calling multiple times there was still no clarification or response. The last call was really startling. They said it was such a mess at customs, so many problems it was unbelievable. They were going to do their best for us. After reminding them last night that we still didn’t get any mail or confirmation the below short text finally came.
“Customs has made the necessary adjustments. Your shipment has been released.
You no longer need to make payment for the receipt of your shipment.”
We’ve spend many many hours on this. Having a business in EU you spend most of your time on (taxes, laws, insurance, banks, payment providers, customs, shippers, lawyers, scammers etc) constantly delivering endless documentation to all kinds of parties. Also the amount of questions and information we had to supply with our banks is utterly insane.
Luckily we’ve got everything in order but it’s a huge pain. Our admin files folder has hit over 20k documents to store for tax purposes. If you think running a company is fun, would like to repeat some famous words “it’s like eating glass”. And it’s not because it’s painful from the positive developments, it’s always the majority of time spend on the leeches of our society. The world has to move to a bitcoin standard.