5 ms·

They want companies in every other country outside of Australia to collect and remit tax to the Australian Tax Office?? Good luck with that! Imagine trying to

They want companies in every other country outside of Australia to collect and remit tax to the Australian Tax Office?? Good luck with that! Imagine trying to get Sven's Online Yak-hair Mocassins in Norway to complete a quarterly BAS. Surprised they are not focusing on LOCAL Aussie ecommerce sites that don't collect and remit GST for local sales.

robryan 10y ago
That's the easy part though. Australian sellers who ship from overseas would be committing tax fraud not to start collecting GST on these sales.
asdfaoeu 10y ago
> Surprised they are not focusing on LOCAL Aussie ecommerce sites that don't collect and remit GST for local sales. Like?
- sjwright 10y ago
  One example is Kogan, who claims the sale occurs in Hong Kong. https://www.kogan.com/au/help/import-duties-and-gst/ https://www.kogan.com/au/help/import-duties-and-gst/
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Most subscription based SaaS services for instance. You usually have a single price advertised for your monthly revenue. Most customers are just an email address, not a physical address. It's a tough call to look at your monthly Stripe payments and try and work out who is a local customer and who is overseas. I know this from hard experience. We have to cross refer the Stripe info across to our user database where we have an 'Office Location' field used in the app itself (for other purposes) to try and work it out. Messy. But without that, it is a wild stab in the dark. I am willing to bet that most AU SaaS businesses are either claiming all their sales are from overseas, or just estimating a %age of Australian customers to fill out their BAS figures.
  - caf 10y ago
    If a lot of their customers are businesses they'll know, because their Australian business customers will want a tax invoice so they can claim it as an input credit.
hirsin 10y ago
If Sven manages to sell $75,000 AUD worth of moccasins to Australians, he might reasonably have the resources to collect the taxes as well. That's not to say he will, but I feel that selecting 75k as a threshold falls on the side of "it's cheaper to comply", which is the right move.
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  $75,000 gross retail, at a usually far smaller profit margin -- call it $7500. Do you seriously expect someone to hire a tax attorney for Australia over that much income? That's the price of walking into the door.
  - wbl 10y ago
    If they are smart they will make the tax so simple you don't need an attorney: just slap a decimal point in the right place and send a check to an easy to find address.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      That's an if.
    - imron 10y ago
      Let me put it like this. The ATO's website for submitting quarterly tax statements requires a Java Applet to perform verification with a private key stored on your machine. Despite Java's "Write Once, Run Everywhere" promise, every single update of my OS (mac) and/or browser would cause issues because the OS and browsers are actively trying to prevent you from running Java Applets for security reasons. Which I understand, and also support, but it means that I'd be locked out of the site and had to spend a couple of hours hunting around forums posts trying to find a solution - and sometimes one wouldn't even exist. My current solution to this problem is to have a locked down, non-updating Windows VM that I use exclusively for filing my business activity statements. It's a pain for me to do it. I don't think it's going to be any easier for Sven.
  - DrDolittle 10y ago
neotek 10y ago
If Sven's using an ecommerce platform like Shopify then chances are all he has to do is click a few buttons to enable tax collection for Australia. I'm sure platform providers will do whatever they need to do to make the process as smooth and simple as possible for their customers, the only other thing to take care of is actually paying the money to the Australian government, and hopefully they won't fuck it up by making it too complex. Then again, this government is pretty incompetent where technology is concerned (cough NBN cough) so who knows.
joshschreuder 10y ago
Isn't that why people use payment gateways? So they can handle all of the processing and legislation for you? For example, isn't something similar already required for collecting VAT in the European markets?

robryan 10y ago

That's the easy part though. Australian sellers who ship from overseas would be committing tax fraud not to start collecting GST on these sales.

asdfaoeu 10y ago

> Surprised they are not focusing on LOCAL Aussie ecommerce sites that don't collect and remit GST for local sales. Like?

sjwright 10y ago
One example is Kogan, who claims the sale occurs in Hong Kong. https://www.kogan.com/au/help/import-duties-and-gst/ https://www.kogan.com/au/help/import-duties-and-gst/
cyberferret 10y ago
Most subscription based SaaS services for instance. You usually have a single price advertised for your monthly revenue. Most customers are just an email address, not a physical address. It's a tough call to look at your monthly Stripe payments and try and work out who is a local customer and who is overseas. I know this from hard experience. We have to cross refer the Stripe info across to our user database where we have an 'Office Location' field used in the app itself (for other purposes) to try and work it out. Messy. But without that, it is a wild stab in the dark. I am willing to bet that most AU SaaS businesses are either claiming all their sales are from overseas, or just estimating a %age of Australian customers to fill out their BAS figures.
- caf 10y ago
  If a lot of their customers are businesses they'll know, because their Australian business customers will want a tax invoice so they can claim it as an input credit.

hirsin 10y ago

If Sven manages to sell $75,000 AUD worth of moccasins to Australians, he might reasonably have the resources to collect the taxes as well. That's not to say he will, but I feel that selecting 75k as a threshold falls on the side of "it's cheaper to comply", which is the right move.

bpodgursky 10y ago
$75,000 gross retail, at a usually far smaller profit margin -- call it $7500. Do you seriously expect someone to hire a tax attorney for Australia over that much income? That's the price of walking into the door.
- wbl 10y ago
  If they are smart they will make the tax so simple you don't need an attorney: just slap a decimal point in the right place and send a check to an easy to find address.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    That's an if.
  - imron 10y ago
    Let me put it like this. The ATO's website for submitting quarterly tax statements requires a Java Applet to perform verification with a private key stored on your machine. Despite Java's "Write Once, Run Everywhere" promise, every single update of my OS (mac) and/or browser would cause issues because the OS and browsers are actively trying to prevent you from running Java Applets for security reasons. Which I understand, and also support, but it means that I'd be locked out of the site and had to spend a couple of hours hunting around forums posts trying to find a solution - and sometimes one wouldn't even exist. My current solution to this problem is to have a locked down, non-updating Windows VM that I use exclusively for filing my business activity statements. It's a pain for me to do it. I don't think it's going to be any easier for Sven.
- DrDolittle 10y ago

neotek 10y ago

If Sven's using an ecommerce platform like Shopify then chances are all he has to do is click a few buttons to enable tax collection for Australia. I'm sure platform providers will do whatever they need to do to make the process as smooth and simple as possible for their customers, the only other thing to take care of is actually paying the money to the Australian government, and hopefully they won't fuck it up by making it too complex. Then again, this government is pretty incompetent where technology is concerned (cough NBN cough) so who knows.

joshschreuder 10y ago

Isn't that why people use payment gateways? So they can handle all of the processing and legislation for you? For example, isn't something similar already required for collecting VAT in the European markets?