Indefatigable VAT campaigner Richard Allen has drawn my attention to the following report on VATLive which provides further evidence that the EU is absolutely right to reject the Chequers proposal that the UK collect taxes on behalf of the EU when they cannot already collect the taxes that are owing right now:
On 19 July, the European Commission sent a warning to the UK that its administration of the VAT Mini-One-Stop-Shop (MOSS) for B2C e-services VAT contravened EU rules.
The EC states that the UK was failing to gather UK taxpayers' bank account information for speedy credits of VAT repayments where changes or refunds were due. The UK now has two months to comply with the rules or face a referral to the European Court of Justice. The EC had previously issued a formal notice on the subject to the UK on 25thJanuary 2018
MOSS was established across the EU in 2015 to enable providers of B2C electronic services to make just one return and payment on VAT charged to consumers across the 28 member states.
Given that we are already subject to litigation on failure to collect duties on Chinese imports it's hardly surprising that, for purely practical reasons, the EU has treated the UK offer as something little better than a joke. Add to that the fact that the UK has not, as yet, got a functioning IT system able to handle Brexit, whilst it also appears we now have no Customs officers located at any port (although I have an FoI request in on this issue to check that) and you can see why May's suggestion on tax collection at the UK border made to the EU really was farcical.
If the UK could, for once, make a serious suggestion to the EU that it might have a chance of complying with on its side then maybe, just maybe, the EU would take us seriously. But there's no sign of that happening as yet.
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As usual for HMRC this particular screw up harms UK business. If a UK seller of B2C e-services makes a credit (refund) entry in their EU MOSS VAT return, HMRC can’t get the cash back to them because HMRC hasn’t bothered to collect bank a/c details. This has hit many micro businesses with cash flow problems
and HMRC have barely mentioned VATMOSS in relation to the new EU legislation on mail order. No mention of it was made by them to PAC during hearings on online VAT fraud. All they did was go on about their pointless split payment proposals (under consultation) which can never happen since they breach the EU Payment Services Directive.
How did a ‘once proud nation’ turn into a basket case ?
Neoliberalism
Thatcher, Major, Blair (new Labour), Cameron and May, all the political and economic power of the state must be used for the benefit of the few !
It does not bode well for what might come after whatever BREXIT we get.
It feels like the end of the line – the neo-liberal ‘endgame’ to me – as in this is what eventually happens if such faulty thinking is allowed/enabled to flourish. As it has been for far too long.
According to Toynbee in the Guardian a load of last minute bad news policies and decisions were hidden in the last day of parliament:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/taking-out-the-trash-heres-the-bad-news-buried-by-the-tories
No change there then…………the only rational conclusion to be drawn is that the Tories are still – despite any axiomatic contraindications to their actions and beliefs – wedded to their neo-lib idiotology (sic).
The Tory party is like a dog with rabies – in awful pain and suffering but also a threat to others and where the kindest thing to do is to take them to the vet and have them humanely put down.
Well put
Well I know that at the Port of Dover and Stansted airport if you have ‘goods to declare’ then there is a telephone attached to the wall for you to ring someone. So certainly not much evidence of customs staff there!
Same at Glasgow airport just a mailbox to post forms and telephone
I thought I was George. This is not my post.
Richard, could you or someone please let me know in language understandable by an elderly technophobe, how I change my name for these purposes.
Sorry – I can’t always monitor such things
The ‘other’ George appears to be new here
Thr VAT Moss error is disappointing but unsurprising: for micro-businesses, autjors and small publishers – software included – VAT MOSS was a lobbyists’ stitch-up intended to push us all onto a handful of big platforms and pay an eye-watering ‘rent’ on every transaction, sucking all the value out of small business.
As I say, it is unsurprising that HMRC is using malign incompetence to continue pursuing that agenda, lawfully or otherwise.
The China VAT fraud is something else: too big, and too long-running, to be anything other than a deliberate decision to stand back and knowingly ‘wave through’ billions of dollars of blatant illegality and tax fraud.
A multi-billion dollar fraud, knowingly allowed to run, and run, year in, year out: take a moment to turn that over in your mind and let it sink in.
Who made that decision, and why, are speculations best left for private conversations: there is no good reason for it and you can be certain there’s a bad one.
The only ‘good’ thing I can say is that it started too early to be a deliberate insult, calculated to alienate us from our trading partners and tax-cooperation counterparties. That kind of thinking started later and it is, I hope, still confined to the Home Office and the xenophobic knuckle-draggers of the UK Border Agency.
Unless you can suggest an alternative VATMOSS is the only solution that will remove the need to collect VAT at the border which is the number one cause of fraud (its impossible)
True enough: but the devil’s in the detail and it was implemented – or attempted – in a very damaging way that intentionally favoured a handful of ‘platform’ e-trade companies, who had already negotiated remarkably lenient arrangements for their VAT, and were prepared to trade some of that away in exchange for ‘gatekeeper’ status for all small- and ‘micro-‘ businesses who trade in and into the EU.
Thanks Richard. If it’s OK with you, I’ll start being “George the first”.
🙂
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