"You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to"
Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?
Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?
Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours.
Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used.
I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.
Do you have a link here?
The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills.
Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid:
https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-...
IANAL, and I have only heard about a couple of cases where people have been taxed under this statute - typically carpenters having built or renovated their own homes or cottages.
(Their obvious disadvantage being, of course, that the result of their labour is very tangible - and that whenever you do any significant building work, you'll need permits and documentation afterwards, making it difficult to discreetly renovate something off the books...)
Another thing that makes home construction a bit different in this regard is that you could claim to build a house for yourself, live in it for a bit, and then sell it on a couple of years later. That'd be an easy way to avoid or evade taxes. Not so easy with lettuce -- once you've eaten it, you've eaten it.