New European V.A.T Law - Are You Ready?
 

I have recently been following some important EU related news quite closely over the last few months as it going to have a significant impact on the industry what is this new law? Read on...

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria - 20% VAT
Belgium - 21% VAT
Denmark - 25% VAT
Finland - 22% VAT
France - 19.6% VAT
Germany - 16% VAT
Greece - 18% VAT
Ireland - 21% VAT
Italy - 20% VAT
Luxembourg - 15% VAT
Netherlands - 19% VAT
Portugal - 17% VAT
Spain - 16% VAT
Sweden - 25% VAT
United Kingdom - 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? Afterall, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet (it would appear) was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic chages of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Regards,

Lee

http://www.europeanwebmasters.com

It is not exactly all that new and shocking to me, I know Dutch businesses are required to charge 19% more for Dutch customers, since you need to pay VAT over that. At the moment this does not apply to customers from other countries though. But yeah, this new law would be a real pain in the ass.

One more good reason not to be in the EU!