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New EU VAT rules change the game for digital businesses

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wraith808:
I just don't get the taxation of digital goods.  Even for *local* US municipalities, taxes aren't collected on such.

Just a few large ones I frequent: Drive-Thru RPG, Manning, Apress, O'reilly...

It's not a physical product... so I don't see why it should be treated as such.

Renegade:
This is just hilarious, and is more or less on topic:



 :Thmbsup:

I just don't get the taxation of digital goods.  Even for *local* US municipalities, taxes aren't collected on such.

Just a few large ones I frequent: Drive-Thru RPG, Manning, Apress, O'reilly...

It's not a physical product... so I don't see why it should be treated as such.
-wraith808 (December 31, 2014, 09:11 PM)
--- End quote ---


I just don't get the taxation of goods. Full stop. ;D

Oh, and services. And everything else.

The EU is so far gone wonky thinking that they have some sort of authority over anyone outside of the EU (and inside is still debatable).

But yeah... on the more mainstream front, the EU thinking that it can get a cut of the labours of people outside of the EU is an extreme stretch. The US does the same basic thing though - it taxes US citizens cattle on their worldwide earnings.

This EU nonsense is just more proof that we are nothing but cows to be milked. Whether we are free range cattle or not doesn't really matter much... we're getting milked or butchered.

But, for digital goods, this should just help spur the adoption of VPNs. That's a good thing. Y'know... Always look on the bright side of life?



 :Thmbsup:

Deozaan:
I can understand the argument that taxation is legal plunder, etc., but assuming the acceptance of taxes as the status-quo, why is it MY duty to pay taxes to a foreign government because one of their citizens purchased something from me? Shouldn't it be the buyer's responsibility to report his/her digital purchases on the tax form (as required by law) so he/she can pay the legal taxes to his/her government?

Imagine if my kid went into a store and bought a candy bar and then I went to the store manager and said, "Hey, you owe me 30% of the income you earned from my kid because of the tax rule I made for my kids."

The manager would do at least one of these three things:


* Laugh me out of the store since I have no authority to enforce the tax.
* Refuse to sell candy to me or my children.
* Pay the taxes because I have mafia connections and he's scared of my threats.
But since I'm not a thug, and I don't have mafia connections, and I'm not making threats, it would be one (or both) of the first two.

I'm just one guy who makes small things and sells them on an online marketplace (much like a flea-market). I don't have the time or resources to find out where everyone who buys my digital goods lives, learn their regional tax laws, then charge them extra to cover the taxes.

Which means I charge the same amount of money for the "goods" I'm selling no matter where they live, which means I make even less money since now my income will be taxed not only by my own government, but now also by a government which as far as I can tell has no authority to demand taxes from me, which means I have even less resources to figure out how to comply with their stupid tax laws. Which means I may have to refuse to sell to anyone who lives in the EU, which means I have even less money. Which means I may go "out of business" due to all these silly regulations.

Thanks for helping to build the economy!

TaoPhoenix:
Sales taxes are such a mess.

In the "meat world" the seller is responsible for sales taxes on all applicable "small items" and there's no requirement for consumers to report anything. You don't report that you bought a soda. The seller is supposed to charge *either* 1.0x as the marked up price, or if they want to use "convenient pricing" aka "it dollar" (dialect included), they're supposed to do the calculation backwards on some "real price" of 0.9x cents plus the tax.

However, if you look closely, you see a lot of the local little stores purposely under-ringing sales to sometimes astonishing degrees. There must be some deal with the cops - in one sense if the cops "really have better things to do", that's kinda a cool philosophy (until next week's facepalm incident shows up!).

Most digital purchases are small. So I'd think it normally is the seller's "responsibility" to ... "try" to collect the taxes. Now that's between an avalanche and a earthquake of pain, but it's not the consumer's duty to do anything fancy.

But with the insane cross-routing of jurisdictions, I'm pretty sure that's one reason the "temporary" reprieves have lasted this long - elsewhere people bitch about 99c being "too much to pay for software" ... ??! It's not. It's a "meme" that you're "not supposed to have to pay anything". And even at minimum wage, it could cost equivalent of $25 in research to figure out the correct sales tax to levy per country not counting extra software dev.

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