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> Having the option to not comply with laws, is an unfair advantage. All parties in this scenario are legally compliant. > VAT is a sales tax, effectively, bu
by weberc2 7y ago
> Having the option to not comply with laws, is an unfair advantage.
All parties in this scenario are legally compliant.
> VAT is a sales tax, effectively, but even that is managed away fairly easy. It's an efficient tax, but when it comes to B2B activity it's effectively unpaid. Amazon, though is a retailer, has a very large amount of B2B business.
How does its B2B business help Amazon evade taxes? When I think about AWS, the billing doesn’t seem to lend itself to any obvious sales tax evasion schemes...
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago> All parties in this scenario are legally compliant. They were complaint with the letter of the law, but the law makers decided that the companies were not complaint with the original spirit of the law. So they introduced a new law so that all parties can also be complaint with the spirit. In software engineering terms, the written down code was not producing intended behavior. So new code has been written to deal with this bug.
- weberc2 7y agoThat seems like a reasonable history of the events, but I don't think it supports the original position that these tech companies had an unfair advantage. Or if it does, only for some definition of "fairness" that is subject to the whims of (biased) French legislators.