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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian here. Would you also have to pay VAT on the product itself? I.e. 250USD in VAT on the gold, 250 on the PC? Or is the latter part dropped? Because if this is the case, it doesn't really matter since you need to pay VAT on products you buy from abroad regardless.

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I am not a lawyer. But I think you would pay custom duty of 25% on the pc. It even worse, because your 1000 USD pc is now not a 1000 USD pc, but a 1250 USD pc because that is what you paid for it.

I believe it would go something like this:

* You want to barter for a 1000 USD pc located in the US and pay 1000 USD worth of gold.

* In Norway you then pay 1250 USD for that weight in gold (1000 USD for the gold, 250 USD in vat) and send it to the US.

* The pc is sent to you, but is now worth 1250 USD because that was what you paid for it, so you pay an additional 312 (25%) in custom duty.

* Making your 1000 USD pc costing you 1562 USD.

So bartering with assets like gold and now BitCoin may not be a good idea as a private citizen. Companies of course are exempt from vat, so other rules apply.

> Companies of course are exempt from vat, so other rules apply.

If a company buys a 1000 USD computer to sell it, then the ultimate buyer pays the VAT. However, what happens when a company buys a 1000 USD computer to replace a server rack? At what point does "consumption" happen?

Only private citizen pays vat.

In practice it works so that everyone, both private citizen and company’s pays the vat, but companies can fill out a form and get the vat returned if the product was for internal use. They then add vat to their end product.

For example:

* A company buys a 1000 USD server and pays 1250 USD (server + vat). It sells it to a private citizen for 1250 USD (no profit). It can then keep 1000 USD and must give 250 USD to the state.

* A company buys a 1000 USD server and pays 1250 USD (server + vat). It sets it in a rack for internal use, and can then ask for the 250 USD vat back from the state.

VAT is a tax on "value added". So a (VAT registred) company only needs to pay VAT on the value it provides. Eg: you sell services for 1M NOK/year, you then have to claim VAT from your customers, totalling 250K NOK. But, you also pay for hosting, hardware etc, for say a total of 300K NOK -- so you subtract the VAT on that 300K (7.5K NOK) from the VAT you have to pay the government, and pay 250K - 7.5 K in VA tax.

(In reality you might do a lot of these deals b2b, and not actually transfer/invoice the VAT -- but that's the basic idea).

Oh, yeah, also not a lawyer, but a Norwegian.

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