Posta Romana-colete extracomunitare sub 10E -comunicat

De minimis level, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Trade Facilitation Implementation Guide is ‘a valuation ceiling of goods, including documents and trade samples, below which no duty or tax is charged and clearance procedures, including data requirements, are minimal’. This is based on the Latin expression ‘de minimis non curat lex’ meaning ‘the law does not bother (concern) itself with trifles’. In the European Union (EU), where – apart from obligatory customs duty to be paid on imports on most of the goods – the tax on importation is VAT, the de minimis threshold:

•   for customs duty was established at ECU1010 by regulation 918/83 (OJ L 305); increased to ECU22 by regulation 3357/91 (OJ L 318); increased to EUR150 by regulation 274/2008 (OJ L 85)

•   for VAT was implemented by Directive 83/181/EEC (OJ L 105) which allowed Member States to individually exempt imports of goods of negligible value not exceeding ECU22; EU-wide obligatory exemption at EUR10 was imposed by Directive 2009/132/EC (OJ L 292), which also made it possible to increase this threshold up to EUR22 by individual Member States.

From the above it results that, in fact, in the EU an obligatory exemption from VAT applies only for goods of value not exceeding EUR10. Having in mind that most of the EU Member States however used the right to increase this threshold to EUR22, as of November 1991 we can speak (for the purpose of this paper) of exemption from duties and import VAT of goods which value does not exceed EUR22 (that is, only then are both the customs regime and the VAT regime allowed to set de minimis at EUR22).