EUVAT - Amazon's coping method.

I was going to post my reason for being furious with VATMOSS today, but I saw this in the paper in the supermarket and thought it needed to be said.

In a case study for a client in February I pointed out that there was one very simple reason VAT would hit smaller businesses disproportionately. That was because multi-nationals could afford to set up subsidiaries in each country and route VAT through them, so only need to deal with one VAT rate per office and removing the requirements to store customer details. Small businesses rely on the same website supplying every country, so need to split the sales down by country, record and store customer details etc. which creates a huge admin overhead.

And what is in the Mail today?
Amazon sets up UK subsidiary to handle UK sales
The Mail have given it a nice spin of “they’ re finally paying tax”, without mentioning the laws that would have forced them to pay the VAT anyway. Note, this neatly takes Amazon UK out of VATMOSS.

Now if a company the size of Amazon would rather set up a new subsidiary than handle VATMOSS admin requirements, what chance do small businesses have?

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  EUVAT - Amazon's coping method. - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/05/23/euvat-amazons-coping-method/ was published on May 23, 2015 at 10:50 am.