| The really major f-up is that of online sellers ... who did absolutely nothing during the entire process of creating and implementing this change, and only now start to whine when it's way, way too late. And what exactly do you think an affected seller should have done if they had no reason to know these changes even existed? Certain government representatives have been claiming that they have provided information and notified businesses. However, right now the Internet seems to have no shortage of small businesses who claim they had never heard of this change until very recently. I can certainly understand that: I personally run two businesses that could potentially be affected by these changes, both already VAT registered, yet I have no indication that our government has made any attempt to notify either company in any way about these changes. Even some on-line payment services and marketplaces appear to have had no idea, and it looks like some won't be able to support the required taxation and record-keeping in time. These are the very organisations that many people in governments seem to have assumed will fix the problem because according to them almost every micro-business uses one! This is one piece of legislation that could probably have been stopped or redirected quite early on, if those affected had just bothered to try. I'm not convinced it would have helped even then. This is the same EU that imposed those mandatory cookie notices. More recently, they pushed through consumer protection regulations that mean if someone wants to buy a digital download and gives you their money today, the default is that you must not actually provide the data to them for two weeks, among other similarly unhelpful-to-anyone measures. No doubt some of these measures were promoted with genuinely good intentions, but it is clear that the people writing the laws and regulations are completely disconnected from the realities of running a small business. It will be literally impossible for a lot of small businesses to comply with the letter of the law under some of the new rules. The biggest irony of them all is that the most likely beneficiaries of these changes are... big US businesses, specifically those which function as on-line marketplaces and have the resources no small business does to investigate and comply with all the new taxation and reporting rules and to put up a serious legal fight if they are formally investigated for failing to do the impossible. |