[Silhouette]

The recent changes to EU VAT were an unmitigated disaster from the start, and they remain so to this day.

For a start, it is effectively impossible for any business to fully comply with the rules now, unless it literally has the resources to understand detailed tax rules in every EU member state.

Even a good faith effort to comply with the spirit of the new rules and file the necessary returns will be beyond many micro-businesses. As a direct consequence, it appears that many people's side-businesses have ceased trading altogether, which of course is a loss to those businesses, their customers and the tax revenues of the affected states. The relevant authorities failed to even recognise that many thousands of such businesses existed at all, or to consult with them or take their situation into account in any way when writing the rules. In some cases, senior government figures even expressed surprise, when awareness was finally raised among the small business community literally just a few days before the new rules kicked in, that no-one had spoken up sooner in the multi-year process of writing the rules (that none of the affected people had any reason to know about).

Perhaps the biggest kick in the teeth of all is that for most small businesses that were large enough that it was worth continuing, the easiest way to comply was to outsource the various handling to specialist services. Given that the claimed purpose of these rules was to make it harder for large international businesses with lots of accountants to reduce their tax payments, would you like to guess what types of business were best placed to offer those new specialised services to the small, local businesses who got screwed by the new rules and thus profit off the creation of those rules at the expense of the small businesses?