Brexit VAT rules: shipping notice on a Dutch ecommerce store | Hacker News Reader

Brexit VAT rules: shipping notice on a Dutch ecommerce store

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This looks like a poor attempt to compensate for leaving the VAT MOSS scheme.

As I understand it, vendors in the EU have to charge tax rates based on the customers location and transfer those taxes to the customers country. For example, a shop in Germany that sells to a customer in Italy has to collect Italian VAT and send that VAT to the Italian tax service.

VAT MOSS simplifies this by allowing vendors to send those taxes to their local tax service which handles the international transfers so while vendors still have to charge multiple tax rates they only have to register and pay taxes in a single country.

Apparently the UK wants to continue collecting VAT from EU vendors but since they have left the EU they must invent their own scheme to do so.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...

Your link applies to digital services only, while the UK change is for physical goods only.

But MOSS is indeed scheduled to be extended to cover physical goods on July 1st, 2021 (https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/modernisi...), and this UK scheme is indeed somewhat similar to that.

However, EU vendors only have to charge destination country VAT if they exceed a yearly sales threshold (currently 35000 EUR or 100000 EUR depending on destination country, and after July 1st 10000 EUR EU-wide).

And the EU import scheme will remain optional to out-of-EU sellers, unlike the UK scheme.

Thanks for pointing that out, it's an important detail.

I worked on a VAT system for an online store but I never looked into the regulation so my knowledge is limited!

This change is particularly insane. If you are an overseas business that sells goods that cost £135 or below (per consignment) you have to register for VAT in the UK. If you sell goods that cost more than £135 you don't however because the VAT will be collected as import VAT at the border. Basically this is all about shifting the administrative burden of collecting VAT from HMRC and customs and excise onto exporters. The only bright spot is that online marketplaces rather than sellers will be responsible for collecting VAT, so if you're selling on Etsy, eBay, Amazon etc. you don't have to worry. If you're selling directly though you do. [1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-vat-tr...

Hooray for small businesses, now the giants will get even more entrenched, and more small businesses will move to simply being a reseller on Etsy or Amazon, rather than having their own presence.

And the already rich get richer.

Existing VAT and sales tax regimes have not really kept up with the fact that it’s practical and easy for someone to order a single widget directly from the factory in China and have it turn up at their house. The concept of having an exporter, importer and a dealer between them and the customer is dying out and so I don’t really see other states moving away from doing this.

The store rightly says that doing what the UK expects for every country is basically impossible. A more realistic thing that I see happening is that this gets offloaded to the postal services in the same way passenger taxes are dealt with by an airline, who of course do have to deal with 195 slightly different requirements to operate there, as postal services (DHL, UPS etc) already do. The EU is advantageous because at least there is some harmonization happening and they are acting as the clearing house for when this is implemented for intra EU transactions (mid this year).

Also I would like to point out that any package sent from UK to EU and vice versa will have to go through customs office. You will have to pay VAT at the customs office when you receive a package from UK. You will also usually pay flat rate fee for processing at customs office (to your postal service). This will affect all packages even gifts with low value (change in EU after 2020). Receiving small low value packages will be very inefficient (a 10 GBP package can have 10+ euro import duty plus fees). UK and EU only agreed on zero customs fee - which is small compared to VAT (usually around 20%).

Welcome to the Swiss experience!

Now would be a good opportunity to open a package forwarding service or package holding service in a neighboring country.

(That's pretty much the only way to buy goods from German Amazon etc. into Switzerland without paying those unpredictable customs fees.)

Are these services legal?

Yes. For clarification:

To ship a product from Germany (DE) to Switzerland (CH):

The package forwarding service XYZ is a company registered in both DE (as XYZ DE GmbH) and CH (as XYZ Switzerland AG).

You (the customer) order a package to be shipped to XYZ DE GmbH. That company pays the toll on the goods, then ships them from XYZ CH AG to your private address in Switzerland.

This is basically not a different process than normal shipping, except it doesn't require the seller (in Germany) to do toll declarations and pay the exorbitant DE->CH shipping.

Since CH isn't in the EU, those are really big obstacles. A lot of shops in DE just won't ship to CH, or demand upwards of 25€ for shipping (but not tolls - you'll be out another 20€ or more for that).

> even gifts with low value (change in EU after 2020).

What change is that? AFAICS there have been no changes and no proposals to change the directive 2006/79/EC which covers the 45 EUR gift exception:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...

For commercial packages the changes wil apply on 2021-07-01. However, note that there will be several improvements to the system:

- The seller/marketplace can pay for VAT for under-150 EUR packages so the recipient does not need to pay (IOSS system) - similar to the UK system in OP, but optional to seller.

- The carriers can use a simplified customs process to declare under-150 EUR packages in bulk, lowering their costs.

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/modernisi...

Living in Norway I find this outrage somewhat amusing. Welcome outside of the EU. That's been standard since forever over here although it's usually the buyer that has to pay for processing.

A particularly extreme example was an old camera I bought on Ebay from Germany for like 25€. That was well under the 350 kroner limit for imports so I thought i didn't have to pay anything extra other than the relatively high 20€ shipping. Turns out the 350 kroner limit also includes the shipping cost so not only did I have to pay ~6€ VAT but also 200kr(~20€) VAT processing fees taking my 25€ camera to 71€.

Norway has now completely done away with the 350kr limit so you always have to pay import tax (mainly to stop the flood of cheap 1€ packages from China). I haven't done many international orders since then but I believe at least Ebay now collects taxes as an intermediary.

It was normal in the UK as well for the receiver to pay import duty and VAT on purchases from outside the UK/EU. The scale of imports meant you could get quite lucky with whether or not you’d actually end up doing so.

> Norway has now completely done away with the 350kr limit so you always have to pay import tax

On the flip side, they've introduced a scheme[1] which allows the seller to pay the VAT, so the package can pass through customs using a simplified customs declaration step, so they buyer doesn't have to pay the handling fee.

This makes it more predictable for the buyer, and it avoids that jump above 350 NOK.

edit: This seem not entirely unlike the MOSS scheme[2] linked in another subthread.

[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/vat...

[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/modernisi...

when I go to the official site https://www.toll.no/ there it says that there is no import fee/tax for goods from europe. so that means you only need to pay the 25% taxes. and the calculator says 595.69kr when I put 45€ in it (25€ + 20€ shipping)

if customs wanted the money from you it was probably because you didn't declare it upfront. if the vendor wanted the money, than you were ripped off.

it's much better with the current arrangement imo. Whenever i buy something from e.g. aliexpress, ebay etc VAT is payed and there is no suprise fees.

VAT is already a mess, even inside the EU. There's probably some business opportunity lurking in simplifying VAT for small businesses. Hell, there are probably regularity opportunities as well, if lawmakers are interested in small businesses.

I run a small business on the side, did a small project for a customer in another EU country, and got fined by the tax service for not having handled VAT properly. Now this is obviously my fault (and the fine wasn't too steep). It doesn't make financial sense for me to pay for an accountant (very small side business), but it's not easy enough to do it myself without the risk of errors. End result? People are discouraged from running small businesses.

The european VAT systrm is very very simple. Its clear that you have never sold anything in the USA. There the taxes are much more difficult to calculate

I'm not looking for a dick-measuring contest of which VAT system is the worst, thanks.

Where are you located? And what did you not handle properly?

In the U.K. at least you don’t need to do or handle anything VAT-related if you have VAT-able turnover of less than £85k

Most countries have exemptions for small businesses. In Ireland for example you do not have to collect VAT if your revenue is below 72k.

Presumably you should be able to afford an accountant by the time you reach that figure.

It's worth mentioning that you can't deduct VAT on your purchases if you don't collect VAT so if you have low margins that might be an issue.

Edit: The thresholds in Ireland are actually 75k for goods and 37.5k for services. The figure I remembered is out of date.

Is there a list somewhere or how do you know most countries have this?

I've never heard of it and would be very interested in taking advantage.

Sure, e.g. here is an EU list: https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/eu-vat-rules/eu-vat-numbe...

However, note that most of these thresholds apply only to residents of the said country. Distance selling etc. is covered by other schemes and thresholds.

I see. The Dutch threshold was introduced in 2020, which is why I never heard of it. And it's only 20,000 EUR, so just usable for a side gig.

For small projects such as the one you describe, a simpler "One Stop Shop" system has been in effect since 2015.

I understand there is an expansion to this rule coming in July 2021, that removes the need to register in multiple EU countries.

(the UK is obviously excepting itself from that)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-vat-tr...

Sounds well intentioned yet clearly broken, whoever wrote it could surely see the likely effect is exclusion, so why did they push it through? I don't think incompetence can explain this one.

I know very little about trade law so this may be very stupid of me to ask, but if we're making it difficult for foreign companies to sell into the UK won't that put foreign companies at a unfair disadvantage compared to UK companies? Are we going to face retaliatory trade barriers from 195 countries soon as they try to level the playing field for their businesses by making it equally difficult and costly for UK businesses to sell into their countries?

Creating uneven playing field between foreign and domestic businesses was one of the reasons for brexit.

All barriers are about favouring internal producers over external producers. That's sort of the point of them. And it's been like this for the rest of the world for a very long time. All we've done is added the EU countries to the pile - levelling the playing field and sorting out anomalies on the way.

But, importantly, processing these things is somebody's job - which increases economic activity and GDP. So it's not as straightforward as it sounds - particularly when there is a systemic shortage of jobs, and there is a floating exchange rate which balances the effect in any case.

The purpose of these changes is to push trade through Online market places - who sort the VAT for you.

How in the hell is HMRC going to enforce this? Beyond confiscating shipments from sellers who refuse to cooperate (in which case they are punishing the consumer just as much), they can't do much, can they?

This will only punish small and honest sellers. Big ones will maneuver around the bureaucracy and the unscrupulous ones will just ignore it.

Sometimes I seriously wonder if people in the government can really be this dense, because this level of stupidity can only be explained as malice.

Hmrc has lots of experience and a big setup to extract their 20% from shipments from outside the EU that didn’t pay customs/excise/VAT.

So they are well prepared to confiscate your package sent to the UK until you pay up.

(And your courier/Royal Mail will charge you another £8 for the hassle just to rub it in.)

Can't they use the experience and the setup to collect the 20% themselves then instead of whatever this is?

Ok so what you are saying is that non-compliant packages are intercepted and the vat is charged at customs.

Then I ask again, what is the point of this legislation and why would an overseas seller be motivated to bother with it?

It's the customer who has to deal with the hassle in the end anyway.

I'd imagine they'd then have to deal with a lot of returns/chargebacks, from customers refusing to pay to accept the goods.

Simpler to just refuse to deal with the UK.

The big issue I see with this is that the new rules do not mandate any kind of identification on packages that have the VAT already paid, so they can't identify VAT-unpaid packages.

And as the seller is now responsible for VAT for B2C consignments under £135, I'm unsure if they can extract the 20% from the recipient anyway.

I'm guessing that at least for now this means everything valued under £135 is going to go straight through, and they'll implement something sane later...

> Royal mail will charge you another £8

Something similar happened to me. On top of the £8 charge, I had to drive 30 miles to the depot to pay the charge. The Royal Mail refused to deliver it.

I don't know about the HMRC, but fundamentally this sounds like when you ordered from the US to Germany, though with less burdons for the seller. The seller would have to declare any package sent to Germany. Customs would intercept all packages and check their declaration. Packages which appeared to have no commercial goods were just passed on, those which were subjected to taxation would be sent to local customs offices, where one would have to drive to and pay the duties and pick up the package. That was a major pain in the ass for ordering abroad. This got moderately better by big delivery companies like FedEX and DHL collecting the taxes on delivery, saving a trip to the customs office. Sometimes packages escaped the attention of the customs, one shop in the US I had ordered from had declared it a $20 valued "gift". Also often packages would be controlled for illegal content. Sounds like this is another disastrous consequence of brexit.

Declaring is for import duties, vat is on top of that and also applies to services

For both. When you order things from outside of the EU, you have to pay VAT in Germany too. So the declaration also impacts the VAT due.

If the tax payments are made yearly, then individual packages are not at risk. Presumably a company could do a year of trade before the UK government starts asking where their slice is.

This is not one of Brexit pathology. The world is moving to this model, and UK is just ahead of the curve.

I kinda agree with you - it will be the case even within the EU (albeit with fewer steps) that VAT for anything must be collected and remitted from the sales country to the purchasers country.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this could be expanded worldwide, and that as well as paying postage you must also pay the tax to the carrier to submit. This is analogous to how some countries charge arrival / passenger taxes. (UK APD, US - various ‘security’ and ‘arrivals’ fees) You usually pay this to the airline and they must pay it on your behalf.

> I kinda agree with you - it will be the case even within the EU (albeit with fewer steps) that VAT for anything must be collected and remitted from the sales country to the purchasers country.

But unlike the UK import VAT scheme, the EU system will not be mandatory for sellers in all countries worldwide.

> It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this could be expanded worldwide, and that as well as paying postage you must also pay the tax to the carrier to submit. This is analogous to how some countries charge arrival / passenger taxes. (UK APD, US - various ‘security’ and ‘arrivals’ fees) You usually pay this to the airline and they must pay it on your behalf.

One can hope :)

I agree - the UK setup here is a bit daft. But it's not the first place in Europe to demand that other places (wherever) register and submit tax there...

One example: I live in Finland, and if you were to send me beer in the post (from within or without the EU), then actually Finland would expect you to pay Finnish alcohol exise on it though as they count it as distance selling if you were to orgainse transport of it[1] (by posting it). Of course, it's basically unenforceable, it's a loophole that is heavily exploited, and there is ambiguity surrounding this and free movement of goods.

[1] https://www.vero.fi/en/detailed-guidance/guidance/48631/rule... (Sec. 2.5.1)

EU is planning on tackling in-EU cross-border excise taxes in 2022:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=16034468... (point A25)

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...

USA relative posted us (UK) a vase he handmade, new hobby. Marked as gift but put $100 as insurance value. That's more than £18 so customs charged us 20% vat plus £12 processing charge. So became rather an expensive gift. If he had not marked it as gift we would have also paid vat on the 50$ shipping!!! (Why is USA postage so much). So items from abroad can suddenly become very expensive. In the plus side books are tax free in the UK which is nice.

"Less red tape" indeed

Haha yes, all lies

There is a big driver around carousel fraud here : https://medium.com/ecajournal/how-criminals-evade-vat-and-ho...

I don't understand this. I'm in the UK and when I order items from the USA the shipping party has to declare the category of good and value to customs. Customs then invoice me for the VAT, any duties and an inspection fee (usually £12 / $ 16 US).

Is this changing for the US as well?

Yes, this change means seller (or marketplace, if one is involved) is responsible for the VAT for consignments under £135 from US to UK, not recipient.

To me it seems like the intention is to make the seller responsible for the VAT, but HMRC has really no ability to enforce this on overseas parties with no UK presence so it still ends up being the responsibility of the recipient and/or postal service. I imagine nothing will change for the customers, apart from some shops outright refusing to sell to them, and some other shops just ignoring the rule. Then the recipient will get the VAT bill + 8 pound surcharge from Royal Mail when they pick up the package.

> Then the recipient will get the VAT bill + 8 pound surcharge from Royal Mail when they pick up the package.

I can't see how - Royal Mail / customs cannot distinguish "seller does not intend to report and remit VAT" packages from "seller intends to report and remit VAT properly" packages.

I imagine that will be rectified at some point, though, maybe by requiring some sort of identifier on the packages (like in other countries operating similar schemes).

So, how does this work as compared to how it was before. If I mailed some merchandise to the UK from outside the EU in the past, it would be charged VAT at 20%, payable by the customer. Is this still true for businesses who aren’t interested in dealing with HMRC?

AFAIK we don't know how they deal with non-compliant packages yet.

But they are not mandating any kind of identifier on UK-inbound packages to say "VAT already paid on this package", so I don't see how they could even identify non-compliant packages.

All UK packages received in EU will go through customs office and you will pay VAT + processing fee (depends on the delivery company). This is for all packages, no minimum value exceptions. I know I will be avoiding UK e-shops due to this.

Most EU countries still have the 22 EUR low value threshold.

The directive changes to remove that threshold will apply from 2021-07-01, and starting from that date the sellers and marketplaces will be able to handle the VAT for you so no need to pay anything upon delivery (similar to the UK scheme in the OP, but not mandatory for sellers).

Also, e.g. Amazon.co.uk already charges VAT in checkout ("Import Fees Deposit") for EU customers so there will be no customs charges on delivery. (They manage this by having the carriers bill sender for VAT or by importing the items to EU themselves first.)

I hope it will be like that. But small sellers or eBay private sellers will not bother with this.

I'd guess eBay will enter the scheme as a marketplace, so eBay sellers themselves won't need to bother.

Stores will probably charge an additional transaction fee for that. Hiding it in prices, since there are no protections against that from EU now.

They already do charge more. Like €11 within EU, €35 within UK for a pair of gloves.

Cant you just use a freight forwarder? Us companies do this with Mexico and Canada already

Any chance that payment platforms like Stripe will provide some APIs for this?

Hypocritical much? A Dutch company shipping to Germany must charge and collect the VAT on behalf of the German tax office. If they ship to France they must collect VAT on behalf of the French tax office. And so on.

Edit: it's the extra fee causing the problem.

Those have a minimum thresholds. The Dutch company only has to charge destination country tax if their sales to Germany exceed 100000 EUR per year or 35000 EUR per year to France. And non-EU companies are not required to charge anything.

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/r... column "Threshold for application of the special scheme for distance selling"

The UK import VAT has no minimum threshold, and unlike EU VAT the requirement applies to all countries.

The thresholds are going to disappear soon™

Yes, on July 1st, 2021, but they will be replaced with an unified threshold: If you exceed 10000 EUR in-EU cross-border sales in a year, you will have to charge destination country VAT. Otherwise you can continue charging seller country VAT.

Also, from that date, you will not need to register for VAT on the destination countries anymore, you can just remit VAT for all countries to your local tax office. Which is what they use as justification for lowering the threshold.

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/modernisi...

I remember reading something about this, IIRC goods will join the VATMOSS scheme while the above thresholds apply before this happens (and the whole thing was postponed due to the pandemic). And VAT on digital services should get a threshold now

The VAT on digital services has had the 10000 EUR threshold since 2019-01-01. The same will apply to EU-to-EU cross-border goods starting 2021-07-01 when physical VAT OSS starts.

With the EU scheme the Dutch company doesn't have to register with the German or French tax offices. So while the Dutch company in your example would have to charge 19% VAT to its German customers and 20% to its French customers it only has to report and pay those taxes to the Dutch tax office.

So beyond the fee there is also an additional bureaucratic burden with this UK scheme.

I know little about how payment processors function... but surely they are a far better positioned target for this type of legislation? they are fewer, larger, and in a position to completely automate collection of VAT.

There are reduced rates of VAT for certain categories of products and services so payment processors would need to know what the charge they are processing is for.

It's not uncommon for invoices to include multiple VAT rates in certain industries so that would add another level of complexity.

A grocery store will charge different rates for essentials and non-essentials, a builder will charge different rates for materials and services, and there are probably other examples that apply to online sales too.

Isn't that exactly the job of customs office?

Why do the work yourself when you can ask others to do it and in return you also tax them for it?

As far as I know the EU customs office will be collecting VAT on ALL packages from UK. At least that's the information I have on Slovak customs office.

According to Slovakian Financial Administration the 22 EUR low value consignment exemption is still in effect, similar to most other EU countries: https://www.financnasprava.sk/en/businesses/customs-duty#VAT (or the page could be out of date)

This will change on 2021-07-01 as that relief is replaced by other schemes, though (https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/modernisi...).

Didn't their gov plan to make UK a trade hub between CN, US, and EU?

And now not even the EU wants to trade anymore?

Plan is a big word in the context of Brexit! There has been very little consensus on what the referendum actually meant and much of the delay in the process was down to the UK government's collective indecision.

One incident which highlights this is the first indicative vote in 2019. Almost three years after the referendum, Parliament voted to see which option was preferred and none of them had majority support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_votes_on_Brexit#...

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