Anyone from the US gone down the path of registering with the UK/Ireland/Malta VAT MOSS?
From reading various posts, it appears that anyone in the world selling digital goods to the EU is going to have to deal with VAT now.
In summary, it appears you need to:
- Capture IP and address of each customer
- Handle vetting VAT IDs for businesses via VIES and not charging them VAT
- Calculate the VAT rate for each of the 28 EU member states
- Submit a payment each quarter to the VAT MOSS you sign up with
- Generate VAT invoices that are valid in each of the 28 member states
Some of the wrinkles seem to be (using the UK MOSS as an example):
- The currency conversion from USD to GBP happens from customer to you at the time of purchase, but quarterly from you to the MOSS. This could lead to either paying out more than you collected for VAT, or paying less.
- Paying the UK government from a US bank account - I have no idea how this works. This could be gross.
- I havenāt found a resource that spells out what you need to have on invoices for them to be VAT compliant in all member states.
- According to research Iāve done, it seems that the ViES API tends to be rather poor in terms of performance and availability
- The documentation implies to you have to capture the users IP and address, but they also talk about them being non-contradictory. Do I now have to geo-locate all IPs? If the IP and address donāt agree, what do I do?
- VAT rates change over time, so you have to keep up with them
Obviously there are now companies selling services to deal with some issues for you, such as http://www.taxamo.com/.
Iāve had some discussions with people online over at Hacker News. Some are insisting that US businesses donāt need to worry about VAT on eservices, but pretty much everything Iāve seen indicates we definitely do.
Has anyone else dealt with this yet, and do you have any advice?