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Comment by jpallen | Hacker News Reader

The VATMOSS rules mean that you need to collect, verify and store a bunch more info than previously: You need to be able to show evidence for the country the buyer is in, and check that ip address, address, credit card, etc match. It sounds like the cost came from the software development required to put the infrastructure in place to adhere to this and so wasn't something an advisor could help with.

With it being a new rule, there was very little info about the penalties for not complying. The penalties for normal UK VAT are only proportional to revenue, so not much risk for small companies getting it wrong. It wasn't clear that this was true for VATMOSS and so there was fear amongst even tiny company of big penalties for getting it wrong.

We went through the same worries last Nov/Dev, but were lucky that our billing provider dealt with adding in all the required logic. (Shout out to Recurly!)

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Stupid question: is there a service which you can hand off the evidence-gathering to? Seems like a very good opportunity.

Yes. I've been researching this in recent weeks, and have found several operators that build on top of Stripe and PayPal, in various ways, to handle the VATMOSS burden.

Without offering any recommendation for them, here are two I've investigated:

* https://www.taxamo.com/ * https://quaderno.io/

Another comment mentions http://www.fastspring.com/vat

There are various attempts, but currently no one - especially not HMRC - has any idea how to handle VATMOSS correctly.

I've heard a few stories about small businesses suddenly getting demands for thousands of pounds (etc) after only a handful of transactions.

But what I suspect will happen is that HMRC will realise that chasing and fining microbusinesses for non-compliance is a complete waste of everyone's time. They won't bother unless businesses are being obviously, blatantly fraudulent - and considering how short-staffed they are, perhaps not even then.

It'll be similar to the EU's legislation about cookie notices, which created a big initial compliance explosion, but now seems to be being quietly forgotten.

The UK is lobbying hard to set a minimum threshold for VATMOSS. It will take a few years for the idiot lawyers in Brussels to catch up, but even though some member states seem to think VATMOSS is a good thing, common sense and experience will prove that it's utterly unworkable and destructive in its current form.

The stories you heard may have been due to the Irish fuck up a month ago. The Irish tax authorities mistakenly sent out a couple thousand notices claiming completely bogus deficiencies. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083238

Germany and one or two others have also sent deficiency notices to UK sellers. The UK tax authorities have complained about that, saying one of the main points of the VATMOSS system was that sellers would only have to deal directly with the tax authorities in their country. If Germany, for example, thinks a UK seller underpaid for VAT on German customers, the UK's understanding was that Germany was supposed to bring that up with the UK tax authorities, and they would be the ones to get it straightened out.

Recurly does this (see my other comment in the same thread).

Full doc: https://docs.recurly.com/eu-vat-2015#when_to_tax_require_two...

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