As long as you bill/invoice the correct amount (i.e. the correct VAT rate for each member state), a good accountant will take care of the rest.
Oh, and many payment processors won't give you necessary information to comply anyway. You need 2 pieces of evidence from every transaction (address, IP the purchase is made from for example) and you often don't have access to that information.
It's just typical "we know many small business won't be able to comply and we are not going to go after them for now but there will always be something if we need to" kind of thing.
You need 2 pieces of evidence that agree from every transaction, which is a significantly harder standard to meet.
For now, IP address is being accepted as one of them. However, most estimates seem to put geolocation as accurate only for about 90% of checks, and even if it's accurate, the information you'll get back typically won't be enough to determine which rules to apply in member states that have regional variations in their VAT rules.
It's basically impossible to comply properly with the current rules using a fully automated system, and therefore basically everyone trading on-line is risking compliance issues because you can't avoid them. The whole thing is kind of a joke, except for the not-so-funny part where your number comes up and you get business-destroying levels of overhead dealing with the audit.
- the big companies they intended to hit have the resources to deal with the problem, the smaller onces do not.
- There are such things as proxy servers and VPNs.
- many online B2C transactions within the EU are for amounts < 5 euro, the overhead of paying VAT for a single customer from say Slovenia does not weigh up against the profits so entire countries will simply be cut off from being served a variety of services.
It's a huge mess, and let's not get into the Irish authorities incompetence in setting this whole thing up and their communications with businesses all over Europe.
Incidentally, you missed one of my favourite points that the authorities still seem to have overlooked: they apparently continue to assume that those small businesses who do trade on-line are all selling something via some marketplace site, which can therefore take on much of the burden of compliance, record-keeping, and the like. I guess we'd all better start shorting Stripe, GoCardless, and friends, because presumably according to the EU they have no small business customers. ::facepalm::
And as others have also pointed out, there are plenty of very small busineses who could never afford that level of ongoing accountancy support, nor to hire people to develop the relevant record-keeping systems and automate the corresponding reporting processes.
In some EU countries re-selling an item will not trigger VAT, in some it will, in some it might require some work to be done (e.g. refurbishing) in which case you need to charge VAT but even that's not that simple because in some countries you only charge VAT on the actual work and bill of material that went into the refurbishing process, in some countries you need to charge VAT for the whole amount based on the final sale price and the list goes on and on and on.
VAT MOSS also completely ignores the fact that you might be VAT exempt in your own country, if you are in the UK you can choose not to register for VAT if your business earns under 100K a year in this case you simply do not charge VAT, but well Spain doesn't care about that so they might come knocking because you have a Spanish costumer or 2.
There is no realistic way for people to figure out when and how much VAT you'll need to charge, and you'll need quite a good and expensive accountant to sort that out and even they might actually not know everything.
Are we living on the same planet?