Ghost Moving to Singapore

I saw this post just now https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/ and I thought VATMOSS is based on the customer country?

The guy who wrote the post seems not to understand finance, accounting, and international tax very well. Nor do I, but I do know that by moving to Singapore he doesn’t legally gain an exemption from EU VAT rules. However he can safely ignore the VAT rules without risk of retribution. Also, he is an idiot for having publicly blogged that he is flouting the rules.

I’m in Spain; I charge EU customers VAT and submit the tax collected through the VATMOSS process. My competitors are based in the USA; they don’t charge EU customers VAT. They should but they don’t, giving them a price advantage. Sigh.

(Here’s a good reason not to move to Singapore: its government is rather authoritarian. Mandatory death penalty for certain crimes; caning for others.)

Finally, a much simpler solution than implementing VATMOSS rules, or moving to another country to dodge them, is to use FastSpring.

5 Likes