[Silhouette]

I'm sorry, I'm trying to be polite and constructive here, but please understand that this is an issue where some of us spent days or even weeks doing little more than understanding what the new rules actually require and then updating our systems and records to account for them. We talked to lawyers. We talked to our elected representatives. Urgent questions were asked at the highest levels of government. And the loopholes you think might be there are not there. Even the tax authorities themselves have now admitted that they mishandled the situation for smaller businesses, but since snails move at a faster pace than EU bureaucracy, it will probably be several more months before they even debate the issue further.

This isn't really a unified legal requirement where before we got to ignore VAT. In reality, it's quite the opposite. We now have to comply with 28 different sets of legal requirements, where before we only had to charge VAT at our local rate and account for it on our local VAT return. For very small businesses here in the UK, such as someone selling the kitchen table crossword supplies I mentioned as an example before, we weren't required to charge VAT or file returns at all below a certain threshold on a de minimis principle, and no such threshold exists under the new rules.

[pas]

I (we) did the same, as we are selling tickets and goods (digital and umm, regular) online, furthermore do it as a whitelabel platform, so it's definitely a service, but our billing to our clients is different than their billing to the end users (though we handle it for them).

So, I know the problems, I'm aware of the clusterfuck, but it's simply exactly as bad from our point of view as it was before (and at least there is an option to file VAT for the whole EU, which was non existent before, even if implementing it is a pain in the ass).

I don't know why you did not have to - in a legal sense - care about the location of the customer before. Selling something to an EU citizen in a state different from the state your business is established in meant that you were doing business in that state, hence you were supposed to register at their tax office and file and pay VAT on behalf of your customers. Just nobody did, because fuck that.

Anyhow, it's going to be years before it's sorted out. (The "action plan" is to be presented at the end of 2017, http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/action_pla... )

Also, there still seems to be an exemption for small businesses in a lot of member states ( http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/tax... )

[Silhouette]

I don't know why you did not have to - in a legal sense - care about the location of the customer before. Selling something to an EU citizen in a state different from the state your business is established in meant that you were doing business in that state, hence you were supposed to register at their tax office and file and pay VAT on behalf of your customers.

That was never the case, at least not for any business I've been part of. We've always had to charge VAT to EU customers, whether in our home nation or any other member state, but it was charged at our home nation's rate previously and was counted on our normal VAT return. If you think that policy was incorrect and we should have been registering with every relevant EU member state individually, all I can tell you is that two different accountancy firms, independent tax helplines we had access to, and guidance directly from our national tax authority all seemed to disagree with you at various points prior to the recent changes.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm only talking about the B2C sales here. B2B has always worked differently, and there are separate mechanisms for reporting cross-border B2B sales within the EU and dealing with the associated VAT.

Also for the avoidance of doubt, we're in the EU (the UK, specifically). The rules for businesses based in EU member states are somewhat different to the rules for those outside.

[pas]

Sorry, you are right, and I'm also probably wrong, because I remembered the preparation for the recent changes and forgot about the calm times. (And we are technically not in the EU.)