Are you doing business with small traders?

From an online MMORPG developer regarding this: another dericulous imposition by the EU with little thought behind the major effects....

There's already been a thread about this (can't find it right now, though).

Also I am a sole trader and it sucks. Will have to either limit my app's availability to Poland or remove all in-app purchases very soon.

I though in most EU countires you only paid VAT as a business if you want over a certain amount. It sounds like a grab for peoples information as well as more trouble for business.

Are they doing anything about tax evasion/tax havens? I hear they're a big problem in the EU.

Frustrating stuff. Just had a meeting yesterday with my accountant and we got to talking about the sales tax picture over on our side of the pond. It's a pretty messy picture and the rules vary from one state to the next. Likewise, they vary depending on whether I sell something while I'm on site versus while I'm at home. Sounds like things might be equally screwy over there. I hope you guys get things simplified soon.

If you don't have assets in the EU I don't know what they can do to you if you don't follow their rules in the US:

That's (kinda) how it worked so far. You could tax the sales to foreigners locally until you surpassed certain limits (which small businesses could almost never reach). That's gonna change, though, thanks to your incredibly stupid politicians. Not saying that all British politicians are stupid or that others aren't, it did take a very special kind of stupid to push this new law, though.

VAT stands for vauge addition to the total for those are wondering ;p

Yeah? I did a quick'n'dirty search but of the 4 pages of results nothing really matched this... I'll have a more thorough look in the morning. It's 1am here now :(

Yep, don't like small businesses. They are going to turn the entire planet into [url=http://paltelegraph.com/]this.

Imho, one should dissociate :

a) on one side the impact of the change in VAT regulation, which basically means that the VAT rate applicable will not be that of the place of establishment of the supplier, but that of the state of residence of the customer. In other words, the Austrian MMORPG supplier providing a service to a UK client would charge vat on that transaction at the UK rate instead of the Austrian one. ( ie 17.5% instead of 20%) However, the suplier is meant to keep reporting only to his own tax administration, and it is the member states to do the clearing... In theory, there is nothing attrocious to that, it's mostly a bookkeeping issue

b) the control measures individual member states will enforce to manage this. Having worked for 10 years in a tax administration, I can tell you that the natural reaction of these will be to assume that the "normal" situation is when it is the national tax rate that is charged and that any other case should be an exception, thus subject to additional controls ans specific requirements.

As it seems, the Austrian administration has set very strong requirements, and if Austrian businesses are impacted by that, it's their government they should turn to. Of course, it's much easier to blame the EU...

death and taxes

The main issue is that states are broke and ready to try any and everything to raise taxes Politicians of all nations unite to agree that the online consumer is a (tax) milk cow that should contribute more to the common good.

But one should not underestimate the importance of lobbying by (big) business. Just to give an example : in France, two "socialist" members of parliament fielded a proposal that would make it mandatory to use a real estate agent ( in addition to the already obligatory recourse to a notary) to sell any real estate asset. Rumors say a very large realtor organisation is behind this... It's not mystery that Brussels listens more to big business than to anyone else. One interesting but tiresome exercise is to assess the gap between the initial proposals of the EU Commission en what gets out of it when the proposals are discussed in the Parliament and Council. It's sometimes not that difficult to see who's to benefit from changes introduced by the European Parliament . The impact of lobbying on the Commission is more difficult to "guess", but one would have it hard to convince me it's not there too.

And then there is another amjor issue : all thse political bodies are awfully out of touch with reality. Nice theoretical ideas, designed by high flyers and often impossible to implement. It's not just about taxes, but also about energy efficiency, employment, etc.

Sure, but that threshold varies considerably from one country to another. in some cases , In Belgium, it's currently 5580 € a year , and although it will be raised to 25.000€ in 2015, it's still much more difficult to stay under that than in the UK, where the threshold is set at 81.000£