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The EU administration itself or the national tax authorities in the EU should have provided an official service like this to go with the VAT changes for digital
by Silhouette 10y ago
The EU administration itself or the national tax authorities in the EU should have provided an official service like this to go with the VAT changes for digital sales from day one.
I appreciate someone else stepping up and doing it, though I'd want to see more information about the source(s) they were using for the data and how frequently they were checked before I'd hook a real business up to a third party service like this.
- jacquesm 10y agoThey did, it's called the VATMOSS portal: https://www.ros.ie/vatmoss-web/vatmoss.html https://www.ros.ie/vatmoss-web/vatmoss.html The problem is that it is a pain to use and too labor intensive to be practical.
- Silhouette 10y agoI'm painfully aware of the EU VAT MOSS system and how it "works"[1], but as far as I can see, that doesn't explain the source for the near-real-time tax rate data being offered here. [1] Obviously it doesn't really work very well at all, and multiple national tax authorities have already been caught sending unjustified threats to many businesses for money they never owed, among other screw-ups.
- jacquesm 10y agoThis is just a lookup table. An actual service should go a lot further to be useful. Note how it does not matter what country the seller is in so that parameter can be ignored. What remains is a - hopefully always up-to-date - lookup table that converts a country code to the highest VAT Rate. That's hardly worth an API.
- Silhouette 10y agoIt's the "hopefully always up-to-date" that is my concern. There are, at minimum, 28 different rates to monitor here. They can be changed arbitrarily by their national governments, and in at least one case already such a change has been made with just a week's notice. Even if you're only checking those rates against your existing look-up table manually, the effort to do so at least every week is going to add up. There should have been an authoritative, machine-readable source for this data from day one, and vendors should have been able to rely on that data and protected from consequences if the authorities provided incorrect information and vendors acted on the incorrect information in good faith.
- mherrmann 10y agoThe source is mentioned at the bottom of the page. Please read the full page before criticising.
- Silhouette 10y agoI did read the full page. You linked to https://github.com/mpociot/vat-calculator https://github.com/mpociot/vat-calculator, which appears to be another unofficial third-party source. I mean no disrespect, but you're asking anyone relying on your API to trust you with their business. If you or anyone you rely on makes a mistake then your user will probably be breaking the law and on the hook for any missing tax. Moreover, by the nature of this system, the damage could be done in real time before any human reviews and approves any changes to what the customer's business is charging. I don't think it's unreasonable to want more information than you (or your immediate source) currently provide before giving that level of trust in this situation.
- jacquesm 10y ago> If you or anyone you rely on makes a mistake then your user will probably be breaking the law and on the hook for any missing tax. Yep. And the fines for VAT errors range from 'don't care' to 'existential' depending on the amount and the time before the error was detected. The biggest danger that I see is what will happen when the rates change.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoI wonder if all tax rules should be expressed in code, it would reduce ambiguity.