Good news
December 2, 2016You couldn’t make it up. A small band of angry women, about to lose their small businesses because of a piece of legislation that they knew nothing about till it was right in their face, angry that the legislation had been made by people who knew nothing about them and hadn’t done the due diligence to find out they even existed, take on the might of HMRC and the EU tax authorities…
… and win! Yes, the VATMOSS campaign has won its objective of having a sensible threshold to protect small businesses and allow them to grow. Here’s the press release from the EU yesterday:
To simplify VAT rules for startups and micro-businesses selling online, VAT on cross-border sales under €10,000 will be handled domestically. SMEs will benefit from simpler procedures for cross-border sales of up to €100,000 to make life easier;
The full proposal is here, and there’s a rather good impact assessment here. Let’s just take a moment to sit back, pop a bottle of our favourite beverage and, well, rejoice!
Now… it’s only a proposal at present, not settled legislation. So the usual advice is to lobby your MP, your MEP and anyone else you can think of, in order to get it through ECOFIN and into practice.
Question: will the Brexit brouhaha make a lobbying effort from the UK more, or less, likely to succeed???
tiintax 
It’s a good news only if they allow business to apply VAT MOSS before reaching the threshold, if they wish. Changing VAT regime in the middle of a business year, only when the threshold is reached, is an absurdity, and a disaster to manage.
I would expect any business who has a good volume of sales (i.e. over 10k) to push for that possibility, so that they only have to follow ONE set of rules, and not “change the game half way”. We are already pushing for that option to be added, we hope that all small business owners will do the same.