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Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

Here is a blog post by Andrus Ansip, the European Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, on the new EU VAT rules. It's not a particularly supportive or re-assuring post given the criticisms of the new rules

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip/blog/euvat_e...

Apparently these rules were agreed in 2008. Countries have obviously failed to communicate the impending changes. I liked this comment below the post:

"And so much for it being in place since 2008.

This is akin to the Vogons in Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy claiming that the plans for Earths destruction have been available for viewing on Alpha Centauri for 50 years."

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Adams liked that joke so much, he used it twice:

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Which, in my mind anyway, is really the joke itself.

It's worth noting that the post you linked to was from 16 December 2014, which is ancient history in terms of this issue. Vince Cable (the UK's Business Secretary) wrote a similarly ignorant and dismissive response[1] to an on-line petition on 8 December.

However, there has been a lot of further discussion, at least in the UK, since that time. It seems that the government and tax authorities here may finally be realising how much they screwed this one up.

Unfortunately, since most of the small businesses elsewhere in the EU don't even seem to know they're now breaking the rules and their respective tax authorities seem far less bothered about those rules, there isn't the same level of protest (at least not yet) so Eurocrats like Ansip may or may not be under any real pressure to fix the problem so far. And it seems that any serious fix does require further action at EU level, because national governments and tax authorities don't have the flexibility to make unilateral decisions on some of the key points (unless they flagrantly ignore the rules themselves, as several do seem to be doing already).

[1] https://www.change.org/p/vince-cable-mp-uphold-the-vat-exemp...

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