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It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), p

It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), please tell me more!

gberger 6y ago
In the US it's called sales tax, not VAT, that may be why you're not getting results
TomSwirly 6y ago
In fact, there was a wine store in New York City that tried to post the real prices and had some legal issues, so they would post _both_ the "price before tax" and the actual price (in some format that allowed them to evade the laws, so stupid). I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.
- NotEvil 6y ago
  Same way it is here in india too
- csunbird 6y ago
  I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker? I'd argue no - it's not like you can opt to not pay it. I assume your sales tax works like ours (Poland), i.e. per product/service category, so it's also not like you can buy a substitute product with lower tax. I like the solution we have - price stickers have full price, and printed receipts carry tax breakdown.
    - patates 6y ago
      It's the same here in Germany as well, was also the same in Greece and Turkey. I guess the whole Europe is like this, if not everywhere except the US :)
    - michaelt 6y ago
      Bizarre though it may sound, some politicians in America are in favour of badly designed tax systems, for anti-tax reasons. By making tax as difficult as possible, they recruit supporters for their anti-tax stance, and they can claim they're delivering on their anti-tax policy by 'making the system collapse under its own weight' or 'making everyone aware of how much tax they're paying' and they can allow loopholes and fraud opportunities and they can collect donations from tax preparation companies.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      > The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker Especially considering the fact that usually there are 2-3 rates tops, so one can easily remember that 5-10-20% of what they pay goes to the country coffers depending on the product being bought.
    - tekknik 6y ago
      I can think of at least one reason where tax calculated on the final total vs each price is better (for the consumer), rounding. With tax calculated on the final total, you pay at most $0.01 extra in rounding “errors”. However with tax calculated on each price you pay at most number of items times $0.01, which is more and could add up over time. I personally want to give the gov as little of my money as possible.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        That depends on whether they're rounding, or taking a floor or ceiling :). With proper rounding, it's a wash. I just did some back-of-the-dev-console calculations on a random groceries receipt I found on my desk, and I discovered that if the tax was calculated per item, I'd pay 0.01PLN less of it! Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding. Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2]. But in practice, there's little to no difference unless you're doing a single purchase of a lot of items with weird pricing bias. -- [0] - Dz.U.2020.0.106 t.j. - Ustawa z dnia 11 marca 2004 r. o podatku od towarów i usług, art. 106e., ust. 7. [1] - ibid., ust. 10. [2] - ibid., ust. 11.
  - daemin 6y ago
    There are a few details with that: Does the sticker have to show all taxes or just the sales tax/GST/VAT? I know that pretty much every country in the world has an alcohol tax that is applied to things like wine. So should the sticker also include that? In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. But yes I completely agree that the sticker price should include what you actually end up paying for that item. I also like it in some countries where there's a unit or weight cost with the item, so you can more easily compare different branded products. Though they usually make this number comically small on the price tag to make it harder to compare.
    - tekknik 6y ago
      > In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. Which political affiliation and what gives you this idea?
      - daemin 6y ago
        There's been a few articles here on HN relating to free filing and automatic returns and how the tax filing industry is fighting it. One name that popped up after a quick search inside a long article was Grover Norquist. From his Wikipedia entry he is part of a political association which wants to prevent any rise in taxes. From another article I read long ago it was mentioned that this includes preventing automatic filing since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing.
        tekknik 6y ago
        Ah so it's not actually this: > In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. It's actually this: > since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing Along with increasing gov size, increasing gov expense, and destroying another industry. I'm all for increased competition in tax filing software, and you're starting to see open source competition here as well. But spreading opinion as fact, and in this case in particularly, is called "misinformation" or "fake news"
- teh_klev 6y ago
  > I now live in the Netherlands. In the EU it's illegal to show prices ex VAT (or other components that might make up the final selling price) to non-business/commercial consumers. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/6/oj https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/6/oj
saberdancer 6y ago
Also not everyone pays the sales tax so it's probably easier to show price without tax and then on checkout you apply the needed tax rate.
- eythian 6y ago
  Surely most people pay the sales tax, in which case you're optimising for the less common scenario. In places where including VAT/GST/BTW/whatever is normal, shops (usually targetting resellers or contractors etc) where a significant amount of people don't have to pay the tax, I think generally both prices are listed and it's required to be very clear about what's going on.
numpad0 6y ago
Forcing after-tax price displays make tax revisions harder to notice so there are pros and cons to that
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Aren't tax revisions in the local news? Where I live (Poland), prices on shelves are displayed in full (more than that, there's the price you'll pay for an item and price per unit of mass/volume, to enable comparisons), but on the receipt, there's always a per-product sales tax summary printed. So if I cared about sales tax revisions, I could easily notice it on the receipt. But most of the time, I just learn about revisions from a news article.
s1mon 6y ago
In the US, sales tax rates vary by state, county and even city. Some states have no sales tax. It would be impossible to advertise a price for a product when it would be so many different numbers depending on where you are. For example, if a big grocery store chain wants to advertise the price of a 6-pack of Coke, do they list 20 different prices or do they eat the difference in taxes and make the end price the same?
- davchana 6y ago
  Not saying that this will work in US, but India is also like US, federation of states, with federal tax, state tax, city tax all over the spectrum over the length & breadth of country. All advertisements of car, butter, biscuits, house, anything which can be priced over TV/Media advertises its MRP (maximum Retail Price), which is also printed on product itself too. Retailer use stickers on shelf or on product itself to tell what is the actual price, which by law should not be more that its MRP. The taxes along the route, physically & supplier/trader wise affects the price, but it is illegal for anybody retailer to sell anything more that its printed MRP. Yes, same packet of potato chips costs R20 at capital R25 at hill stations (but its MRP shows R25).

It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), please tell me more!

gberger 6y ago

In the US it's called sales tax, not VAT, that may be why you're not getting results

TomSwirly 6y ago

In fact, there was a wine store in New York City that tried to post the real prices and had some legal issues, so they would post _both_ the "price before tax" and the actual price (in some format that allowed them to evade the laws, so stupid). I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.

NotEvil 6y ago
Same way it is here in india too
csunbird 6y ago
I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker? I'd argue no - it's not like you can opt to not pay it. I assume your sales tax works like ours (Poland), i.e. per product/service category, so it's also not like you can buy a substitute product with lower tax. I like the solution we have - price stickers have full price, and printed receipts carry tax breakdown.
  - patates 6y ago
    It's the same here in Germany as well, was also the same in Greece and Turkey. I guess the whole Europe is like this, if not everywhere except the US :)
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Bizarre though it may sound, some politicians in America are in favour of badly designed tax systems, for anti-tax reasons. By making tax as difficult as possible, they recruit supporters for their anti-tax stance, and they can claim they're delivering on their anti-tax policy by 'making the system collapse under its own weight' or 'making everyone aware of how much tax they're paying' and they can allow loopholes and fraud opportunities and they can collect donations from tax preparation companies.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker Especially considering the fact that usually there are 2-3 rates tops, so one can easily remember that 5-10-20% of what they pay goes to the country coffers depending on the product being bought.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    I can think of at least one reason where tax calculated on the final total vs each price is better (for the consumer), rounding. With tax calculated on the final total, you pay at most $0.01 extra in rounding “errors”. However with tax calculated on each price you pay at most number of items times $0.01, which is more and could add up over time. I personally want to give the gov as little of my money as possible.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That depends on whether they're rounding, or taking a floor or ceiling :). With proper rounding, it's a wash. I just did some back-of-the-dev-console calculations on a random groceries receipt I found on my desk, and I discovered that if the tax was calculated per item, I'd pay 0.01PLN less of it! Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding. Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2]. But in practice, there's little to no difference unless you're doing a single purchase of a lot of items with weird pricing bias. -- [0] - Dz.U.2020.0.106 t.j. - Ustawa z dnia 11 marca 2004 r. o podatku od towarów i usług, art. 106e., ust. 7. [1] - ibid., ust. 10. [2] - ibid., ust. 11.
- daemin 6y ago
  There are a few details with that: Does the sticker have to show all taxes or just the sales tax/GST/VAT? I know that pretty much every country in the world has an alcohol tax that is applied to things like wine. So should the sticker also include that? In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. But yes I completely agree that the sticker price should include what you actually end up paying for that item. I also like it in some countries where there's a unit or weight cost with the item, so you can more easily compare different branded products. Though they usually make this number comically small on the price tag to make it harder to compare.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    > In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. Which political affiliation and what gives you this idea?
    - daemin 6y ago
      There's been a few articles here on HN relating to free filing and automatic returns and how the tax filing industry is fighting it. One name that popped up after a quick search inside a long article was Grover Norquist. From his Wikipedia entry he is part of a political association which wants to prevent any rise in taxes. From another article I read long ago it was mentioned that this includes preventing automatic filing since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing.
      - tekknik 6y ago
        Ah so it's not actually this: > In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view. It's actually this: > since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing Along with increasing gov size, increasing gov expense, and destroying another industry. I'm all for increased competition in tax filing software, and you're starting to see open source competition here as well. But spreading opinion as fact, and in this case in particularly, is called "misinformation" or "fake news"
teh_klev 6y ago
> I now live in the Netherlands. In the EU it's illegal to show prices ex VAT (or other components that might make up the final selling price) to non-business/commercial consumers. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/6/oj https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/6/oj

saberdancer 6y ago

Also not everyone pays the sales tax so it's probably easier to show price without tax and then on checkout you apply the needed tax rate.

eythian 6y ago
Surely most people pay the sales tax, in which case you're optimising for the less common scenario. In places where including VAT/GST/BTW/whatever is normal, shops (usually targetting resellers or contractors etc) where a significant amount of people don't have to pay the tax, I think generally both prices are listed and it's required to be very clear about what's going on.

numpad0 6y ago

Forcing after-tax price displays make tax revisions harder to notice so there are pros and cons to that

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Aren't tax revisions in the local news? Where I live (Poland), prices on shelves are displayed in full (more than that, there's the price you'll pay for an item and price per unit of mass/volume, to enable comparisons), but on the receipt, there's always a per-product sales tax summary printed. So if I cared about sales tax revisions, I could easily notice it on the receipt. But most of the time, I just learn about revisions from a news article.

s1mon 6y ago

In the US, sales tax rates vary by state, county and even city. Some states have no sales tax. It would be impossible to advertise a price for a product when it would be so many different numbers depending on where you are. For example, if a big grocery store chain wants to advertise the price of a 6-pack of Coke, do they list 20 different prices or do they eat the difference in taxes and make the end price the same?

davchana 6y ago
Not saying that this will work in US, but India is also like US, federation of states, with federal tax, state tax, city tax all over the spectrum over the length & breadth of country. All advertisements of car, butter, biscuits, house, anything which can be priced over TV/Media advertises its MRP (maximum Retail Price), which is also printed on product itself too. Retailer use stickers on shelf or on product itself to tell what is the actual price, which by law should not be more that its MRP. The taxes along the route, physically & supplier/trader wise affects the price, but it is illegal for anybody retailer to sell anything more that its printed MRP. Yes, same packet of potato chips costs R20 at capital R25 at hill stations (but its MRP shows R25).