Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

“We live in the age of computers,” Eaton said. “It must be possible for Customs Service to program its computers so it doesn’t need a manual review.”

In DHL the link to get tax documents is already broken for a year or so, so I cannot get VAT back on DHL shipments.

With FedEx I can but it's a manual process of screenshotting a bank transaction and emailing a specific email address with a shipping number.

When tariffs started all the servers of the shipping companies went down.

So I highly doubt they will just do some computer magic.

From experience I assume they will "accidentally" run into all kinds of technical difficulties making it a 274 step process to get the money back.

For scale: Shopify, a software company by heart, with 170bn market cap and 3500 engineers employed, does not have native VAT support, required in the Europe which accounts for 15-20% of their revenue. All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.

So to assume a shipping company will just work some computer magic is really far fetched. The FedEx page only lets you login after you refresh the page exactly once already for more than a year.

> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.

If only it would be that simple :)

In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT number the flow might take even 12h+ to verify it. If you can do that verification you can use 0% VAT rate but if not you need to use a different VAT rate.

For B2C you need to support several scenarios: if company is outside of EU it needs to register for IOSS, if it’s a EU company that sells to other EU countries it needs to register for OSS or in each EU country for VAT separately but also a mix of both is possible. You can decide to no register to OSS special procedure but then there’s a sales limit before you have to register and you need to track it. Otherwise, you need to maintain special OSS registry with sales records and three pieces of proof that customer is based in the member country. Some EU countries have XML invoices (Italy, Romania, Germany soon) or mandatory invoice APIs (Poland), of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends on where the company is based.

Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country and they also change occasionally, e.g. Slovakia, Romania and Estonia all changed their highest rate just last year.

This is the bare minimum you need to support. There’s a lot of edge cases, e.g. it matters what country you actually ship from, and if you use e.g. fulfillment there are special procedures for that as well, or if you resell in B2B there are chain transactions which have their own set of spaghetti rules.

Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.

You can simplify for your use case (only B2C or you refund VAT afterwards for B2B, you only ship from one location, custom invoicing), but that’s what it takes to implement it correctly on platform level.

> does not have native VAT support

If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.

If corporations are allowed to implement regulations in faulty ways the economic system stops working and fraud is easier than ever.

Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "anti regulation". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.

Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "pro fraud". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and regulations is something that corruption does not allow for.

> Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms.

Even though it's a sensible claim, and since you're implying causal relationship, can you provide a source for this? I'm not European so I wouldn't know.

> New technologies and increased digitalisation of financial transactions pose additional challenges, such as the convergence of different types of criminal activities like fraud, cybercrime and financial crime into one. Economic and financial crimes undermine legitimate financial organisations, distort competition and the overall dynamics of a free market environment, and have a significant negative impact on society at large. Criminal proceeds also fuel corruption, which in turn furthers crime.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...

It's too bad DOGE killed 18F. Doing this kind of thing, and doing it well was their whole reason for being.

People are really good at using computers when it comes to taking your money. Really bad at using computers when it comes to giving you money. You can’t explain that.

DHL is massive scam company.

I ordered a tent from overseas and they classified it as both a food product and an aluminum product and charged me 600 bucks in tariffs.

I'm fighting to get it back but they keep ignoring me with polite "were really busy" replys.

A product can be both, according to the current US administration. DHL is not necessarily at fault here.

>A product can be both

LOL... A tent is a single product. What about a car? Do you expect to pay separately for the aluminum in the motor and gearbox, as well as for the entire car?

If you'd kept reading the sentence, you wouldn't be asking the questions you're asking.

> A product can be both, according to the current US administration

The person you're responding to isn't trying to convince you that a tent is two things, they're telling you that the US government wants you to believe a tent is two things.

You can eat aluminum? I can't myself. Because it can doesn't mean it should...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com