[Silhouette]

Indeed. In the cast of the VAT mess, they literally didn't even realise that many thousands of very small ("micro") businesses existed. They effectively managed to legislate a lot of those businesses out of existence, because the compliance costs were more than the "extra Christmas present money" level of revenue the microbusinesses were generating. When the relevant officials finally noticed, literally a few days before the new rules came into effect, the initial response was basically "We've been working on this for years, why are people only objecting now?", as if someone selling knitting pattern PDFs from their kitchen table was going to know about EU-level discussions on international tax laws and contribute early. It was like a case study in being totally out of touch and introducing wildly disproportionate administrative burdens, and the officials involved didn't even realise they were the punchline.