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Comment by chrisdew | Hacker News Reader

The worst part is that non-VAT registered (because of turnover of less than £70K/~$100K in UK) businesses will have to register for VAT in each of the 28 EU countries they sell to individually (and probably in 15+ non-English languages).

I intend to stop selling to (non-UK) EU countries in 2015, but I am worried about that decision as it may open me up to discrimination laws. If that's the case, I'll have to close my business entirely.

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There's supposed to be a one-stop shop system to avoid this. Whether it's going to work properly on launch day is another question!

The MOSS (one stop shop) is only available to VAT-registered entities. Making it available to all would solve the problem for me.

But you will be WAT-registered entity as soon as you register in a first country. I still think the law is badly written but I think it does not require registering in all 28 EU countries.

Are you sure about this, I thought HMRC needed a UK VAT registration number?

Honestly, I am not sure about anything related to this law. I am also not UK-based so I don't know haw exactly is the EU directive implemented in UK.

I live in the Czech Republic and here you can become so called "person identified for VAT" which (if I understand correctly - IANAL) enables you to use mini one stop shop for selling over the border while internally (selling inside the country) you remain in non-VAT regime.

Our law is based on the same EU directive as yours so I suggest you check whether your law also offers something like that.

It is still more complicated than it should be (I think the whole concept of VAT is bad) but I hope it is not as bad as registering in all EU countries.

I will also consider 3rd party services like http://www.taxamo.com - I am not related to them, I am just sharing that because you might find it useful.

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