[Silhouette]

How not to pay taxes: don't sell anything.

You jest, but this is exactly what at least one of my businesses is about to do. We are in the UK, so Brexit uncertainty dominates any sort of EU-related planning for the next few months. The EU VAT rules for digital sales were already full of complication and red tape, and right now we don't even know whether the existing UK government systems will still be operating after the end of the current quarter on 31 March because it might all disappear with Brexit on 29 March.

When we took professional advice on how to prepare for this as well as we can under the circumstances, no-one in the room had any confidence in what little formal guidance exists so far or that the official positions currently set out by either the UK or EU governments will be realistic when the time comes. The consensus (by which I mean "view strongly advocated by literally every professional advisor in the room") was to suspend sales to rEU states until the dust has settled, and just redirect our efforts and finite budgets towards customers elsewhere in the meantime. That will inevitably involve some short term financial cost, but then so would making major changes in our technical systems and accounting practices at short notice to comply with all foreseeable possibilities at the start of April.

I don't find it inconceivable that lawyers in places like the US might give similar advice to some clients regarding the GDPR for similar reasons. If the clients are primarily dealing with data subjects outside the EU as well, avoiding the entire area as much as possible might be a reasonable position to take, even if again it's only temporarily until there is more known about the real implications of the GDPR as guidance and the first enforcement actions start to resolve the uncertainties.