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I'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 da
by Silhouette 10y ago
I'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.