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Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

vatmossapi.com

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Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#51

Post by Silhouette »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
Silhouette wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I'm not sure we would have done it if we're realised how much of a pain it was really going to be. I know people running slightly larger businesses (a few employees, turnover in the low millions) who have made similar comments even at their scale. There's certainly a view around that it would be better to simply decline sales to customers in other EU member states, and there was even legal advice being taken…

I simply shut down. The VATMOSS nonsense ate up all the profits turning a 350 euro VAT filing into a quarterly mess costing upwards of 1000 euros. The API could be useful if it is guaranteed to be always up-to-date, but there is no such guarantee, and it makes it impossible as it is coded right now to do anything else but to compute a sale that has just happened rather than a sale which happened at a specific point i…

I simply shut down. The VATMOSS nonsense ate up all the profits

I'm sorry to hear that, though sadly not surprised.

It's also scary how much misinformation or simple ignorance is out there about this issue, and I'm talking generally here not just about parts of this HN discussion. I saw a discussion on another forum recently, and someone there was stubbornly maintaining that compliance was easy and they'd done it and helped other people to do it, yet there was no indication at all that they'd even been aware of the number of edge cases and minor details that can affect what you're supposed to do. I suspect they'd just slapped country-level geolocation on a customer's IP address, checked a country they got from a payment service, and looked up the headline VAT rate, or something along those lines. To be fair, that would probably give the right answer most of the time.

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#52

Post by Silhouette »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
Silhouette wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm painfully aware of the EU VAT MOSS system and how it "works"[1], but as far as I can see, that doesn't explain the source for the near-real-time tax rate data being offered here. [1] Obviously it doesn't really work very well at all, and multiple national tax authorities have already been caught sending unjustified threats to many businesses for money they never owed, among other screw-ups.

This is just a lookup table. An actual service should go a lot further to be useful. Note how it does not matter what country the seller is in so that parameter can be ignored. What remains is a - hopefully always up-to-date - lookup table that converts a country code to the highest VAT Rate. That's hardly worth an API.

It's the "hopefully always up-to-date" that is my concern.

There are, at minimum, 28 different rates to monitor here. They can be changed arbitrarily by their national governments, and in at least one case already such a change has been made with just a week's notice.

Even if you're only checking those rates against your existing look-up table manually, the effort to do so at least every week is going to add up.

There should have been an authoritative, machine-readable source for this data from day one, and vendors should have been able to rely on that data and protected from consequences if the authorities provided incorrect information and vendors acted on the incorrect information in good faith.

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#53

Post by kk_cz »

mherrmann wrote: post #26
kk_cz wrote: post #11

How about different rates for different goods / services? This looks like a gross oversimplification. Doing VAT correctly is quite hard - there is a reason why there are dedicated VAT specialists working in larger consulting firms.

It's only for digital goods/services.

Ok, sorry, now I see it :)

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#56

Post by mherrmann »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #45

This shouldn't be an API. It should be a query library and a dataset you can download with a batch job. Please consider releasing the source code.

All it does is provide a REST API for an existing open source library. That's written on the home page.

You can use the existing open source library (if you're using PHP). But then you have to keep it updated. The API does that for you - as well as allowing you to use it from any language.

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#57

Post by mherrmann »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #55

Something similar, but not the same: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/technicalInformati... Official Europe VAT Verification Service endpoint ( docs ) Edit: for checking the VAT Id

You mean VAT ID verification service. That's needed for when you're selling to businesses in the EU. Then, the VAT you have to charge is 0% and the businesses have to pay it themselves when they buy from you.

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#58

Post by mherrmann »

Silhouette wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but such sales are outside the scope of the VAT MOSS scheme. So why ask for the country of the seller in the API? > Of course the practical effect of the changes is typically that the place of supply is now treated as the customer's location where previously it was probably the business's location, so perhaps that's what you meant and we're really talking about the same thing here. Yes, that's what I meant. BT…

So why ask for the country of the seller in the API? I wondered the same thing. I'm not aware of any circumstances under which it would make a difference that are still affected by MOSS. BTW that 'demand for money' also happened to me My sympathies. The Irish department reportedly wasn't the only one to mess up like this, either, though it's the only one I've encountered personally so far. In the UK, it was actually…

> So why ask for the country of the seller in the API?

I must admit I'm not 100% sure either. I'm just exposing the API of the underlying open source project which says to supply the seller's country [1].

[1]: https://github.com/mpociot/vat-calculator At the bottom, where it says "Important"

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#59

Post by timvdalen »

timvdalen wrote: post #2

Doesn't seem correct, at least for Holland. As far as I'm aware, as a seller in The Netherlands, you only have to charge VAT for buyers that are also in The Netherlands.

Too late to edit: I've only ever handled the B2B case, this seems to be specifically targeted at B2C.

Re: Show HN: A REST API for Calculating VAT in the EU

#60

Post by jacquesm »

mherrmann wrote: post #58
Silhouette wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why ask for the country of the seller in the API? I wondered the same thing. I'm not aware of any circumstances under which it would make a difference that are still affected by MOSS. BTW that 'demand for money' also happened to me My sympathies. The Irish department reportedly wasn't the only one to mess up like this, either, though it's the only one I've encountered personally so far. In the UK, it was actually…

> So why ask for the country of the seller in the API? I must admit I'm not 100% sure either. I'm just exposing the API of the underlying open source project which says to supply the seller's country [1]. [1]: https://github.com/mpociot/vat-calculator At the bottom, where it says "Important"

If you're 'not sure' you should take this offline until you are sure. Bookkeeping is an extremely bad area to go 'move fast and break stuff' because what you're breaking is other people's administrations and you won't have a way to fix it or even to reach them to inform them of an issue.
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