You are directly contradicting what the parent is commenting on. I honestly can’t tell if your current comment is trying to be sarcastic, but you are clearly not putting forth consistent arguments. I personally sincerely doubt EU vat is straightforward. Accounting itself is not straight forward and you can’t do any taxes without accounting. I’m a big fan of corporations paying for failure in compliance, but your tone could be slightly more generous. 25 years could be a big deal if one country requires fifo cost accounting and another requires lifo cost accounting. Do you comply with the one that puts you in jail? do you keep 2 books? do you keep seperate books for each country? Then, which do you actually use to make business decisions? These are kind of hard questions to answer, and can require considerable resources.
And yes, using the correct software suits and processes, intra EU VAT is straight forward and done by litteraly thousands of small businesses every single day. And then there is the less straight forward aspect around optimizing taxes and VAT. But that last bit seems not to be the problem here, is it?
https://macocustoms.sgs.com/?lang=en
All my experuence comes from running the logistics and supply chains cross border and being involved in the proper system and reporting set-up. One of the lessons learned: get proper tax and customs experts, and do what they say. Also get proper accounting experts.
Compliance that punishes smaller businesses disproportionately to multinationals seems awkward, and it’s also unfortunately true that increasing taxes on corporations (like any cost of business) tends to be passed onto buyers of goods and services rather than the intent to structurally promote divestment from consumer-hostile practices.