Replies (5)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Great article, fair summary but...
One thing that has been discovered by some sole traders is that the HMRC website prevents them from registering for the MOSS - it seems that the system has been set up only to allow MOSS registration from "businesses" - the workround seems to be to acquire a new government gateway ID as a business and then register for the MOSS scheme!
A further issue is the date at which various governments want registration to occur. To use the MOSS for January to March 2015, if there has been a sale in January HMRC insisted on registration by February 10th - technically that would then require registration in the member state of the customer but many of these countries want registration to occur BEFORE the beginning of the month in which the first supply is to take place - this is a lunatic position as e-services are by definition those that take place automatically, without significant human intervention, and a trader cannot be aware that a transaction has taken place until after it took place!
There is also evidence that most EU countries have given very little publicity to the new rules and so most small traders, probably numbered in millions, have not registered - only some 8,000 MOSS registrations seem to have occurred so far with the majority of those, by a long way, in the UK!
MOSS
Seems to me like just another EU nonsense dreamed up by some of the many Lawmakers who have nothing better to do than to dream up laws, rules and barriers to business. The rest of the EU will ignore it and the UK will print a 300 page booklet on how to deal with it, including a list of fines and sanctions for non-compliance - monitored by a new HMRC control office to handle it.
If only...
Each country has the right to fine and penalty but NOT HMRC!!! Soi if you make sales in 10 countries and submit the MOSS return late EACH country has the right to impose fines/penalties etc in accordance with their own domestic law. I really pity the first person to get hit!
Why so few MOSS registrations across the EU?
According to VAT Live by Avalara there have been only 7000 MOSS regstrations across the EU and that includes 500 registrations from outside the EU.
Why is this? Have all small businesses - in the UK and elsewhere decided to stop selling to non-buisness customers in other EU countries, or are they all ignoring the electronic selling rules?
Ignorance
Not ignoring - ignorant of it. The move to taxing at the place of consumption for B2C supplies (recommended by the OECD, adopted now by the EU and a couple of other countries so far) is such a fundamental change that it should have been widely discussed, promulgated, advertised notified etc - and, given that it is aimed at taxing multinationals the impact on smaller business should have been realistically considered, which clearly it wasn't. From Facebook discussion groups most EU countries have made very little reference to it at all. In the UK it was only the self-serving publication by a company called Taxamo who wanted to sell IT solutions that alerted many people to the dangers and even they assumed that it was larger business that would be affected. It seems that EU ministers rejected the idea of a de minimis registration threshold at a realistic level that would avoid unnecessary cost for tax administration and protect very small businesses. In Spain, which has no de minimis for VATable activities (and coincidentally one of the highest levels of unemployment in the EU - is there a connection there?) I suspect that small traders will just ignore it as they probably ignore VAT anyway. It is only in the Protestant north that guilt prompts traders to comply, but indeed, why so few?