> The British economy cannot work without Windows PCs, the Office suite, and Azu...

tzs · on April 26, 2023

I work for a non-UK company that has some online customers in the UK and in the EU. We have to collect each country's VAT on those sales.

Before Brexit we used the VAT MOSS system, which allows non-EU companies to register in a single country, collect the appropriate VAT on EU sales, then quarterly send the total VAT collected and a form showing total sales for each country to that single country's tax folks, and that country deals with distributing the VAT to the separate countries.

Post Brexit vote we continued to use VAT MOSS (which has since been renamed to something else that I'm failing to remember) although we switched our registration from the UK to Ireland [1] just in case the UK did something stupid and failed to negotiate a Brexit deal in which they remained part of the VAT MOSS system.

They in fact did fail to remain in the VAT MOSS system, and so we had to register with the UK for VAT. They told is that the tax office was a bit busy dealing with Brexit so it might take a while to actually issue our VAT registration number, which we need in order to actually pay collected VAT to them. They said that until then we should collect VAT, but not call it VAT, and hold on to it.

That was over 4 years ago and we are still waiting.

A country that for 4 years and counting has to tell businesses to not remit collected taxes because that country cannot manage to issue the registration numbers that would allow those businesses to file their tax reports is not a country that instills confidence that they could handle something that is actually hard like switching OS/office suite/cloud.

[1] In retrospect, we should have used Ireland from the start. Getting registered in the first place for VAT MOSS in the UK had involved a lot of paperwork and time, and the quarterly filings required submitting separate spreadsheets for the UK and the rest of the EU.

Ireland registration took a few minutes online. To file we just copy/paste the data from our quarterly VAT report script into a text box on a web form and submit it.