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Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

There was an interesting case in Finland. Finnish customs used to apply a 22% tax (ELV) on top of the car tax for imported used cars from other EU countries. On top of that, Finnish law required VAT to be charged on the car tax itself.

There were multiple court cases and this practice was found unlawful (and actually against EU law). But the government did not issue automatic refunds, and instead requested that people "actively appeal" with some time limits. They also refused to pay interest on the money withheld.

AFAIK, only about 50M Euro was paid back. A lot of funds gathered between 2002–2005 was never returned.

I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.

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> There was an interesting case in Finland. Finnish customs used to apply a 22% tax (ELV) on top of the car tax for imported used cars from other EU countries. On top of that, Finnish law required VAT to be charged on the car tax itself.

There was no VAT payable on the car tax of imported cars, only the ELV (ei-arvonlisävero, literally "not value added tax").

The ELV idea was that for locally bought new cars you did have to pay VAT on car tax, but for used EU imports that was not legally possible (cannot charge VAT again when importing used item from another EU country), so an equivalent non-VAT tax was invented so the full tax (inc. VAT/ELV) stays the same.

But this was unfair for e.g. the reason that Finnish companies buying cars could deduct Finnish car tax VAT on local new cars on their VAT return but not the car tax ELV on imported used cars (since it was not VAT).

> I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.

I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.

Hmm. The "active request" is quite common though. I agree that this is unfair, since it is theft, IMO, but Finland is not the only one forcing active engagement to get your money back. Even when the government stole that money from the people.

> we can and should trust the authorities.

Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...

That may have been the case for some time, but the current government in Finland is... well, perhaps I personally wouldn't describe them as fairly competent.

That's fair, and I understand these sentiments, but there is a pretty big difference between mistakes and deliberate illegal activity, or just not caring if something is illegal or not.

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