The campaign against Channel Island’s VAT abuse has now been formalised under the name Retailers Against VAT Abuse Schemes (RAVAS).
VATloophole.co.uk is run by RAVAS and has been created to give UK retailers affected by VAT free mail order a voice. It details the facts surrounding the abuse of a VAT relief called LVCR which is exploited mainly by companies in The Channel Islands to gain an overwhelming competitive advantage.
Good luck to them. For the Treasury to forego £100 million or more plus UK jobs at this time makes no sense at all.
And for the UK to permit ongoing abuse of this nature is quite absurd.
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Aside from the fact that this saved UK consumers £100 million or more to spend elsewhere (probably on VATable items), does that not mean that sales under LVCR was only around £570m?
Since DVD plus Games sales alone in the UK was £4bn in 2009, is this not really quite a small issue?
@Noel Scoper
All that says is that the 100 million is probably dramatically under estimated
we always err on the side of caution
@Noel Scoper We have definite figure of £165m on Music and DVD alone in 2005. Memory Card business is 7 times bigger plus the many other types of goods, plus the loss of UK corporation tax, benefits paid to people who lost their jobs and so on. In any case, the murder rate in the UK is low that doesn’t justify murder. I know people who have lost everything because of this abuse after building up genuine businesses based on customer service and product quality, not VAT avoidance. There are real people behind these figures.
FROM THE VATLOOPHOLE WEBSITE ” The UK government also appears to consistently underestimate the amount of revenue currently being lost to the Islands; it’s current official figure is £110 million in lost VAT from all destinations into the UK. This is a ludicrously low estimate. The Entertainment Retailers Association place the figure at £165 million for CD’s and DVD’s alone and at least 90% of that is due to The Channel Islands. This figure also doesn’t include the huge markets of computer memory cards (an industry 7 times bigger than the music industry) computer games, health foods, other computer products, camera spares, mobile phone spares, greetings cards and many other high volume low cost goods that are currently being shipped to the UK”