Posted on 08/28/2015 11:09:42 AM PDT by george76
Law of Unintended Consequences: New EU Tax Laws Force Thousands of Businesses to Close in Just Six Months { Full title ].
New European Union tax rules introduced in January have already driven thousands of small companies out of business, with thousands more set to follow as awareness of the change in the VAT law grows. Research has shown that incompetence on the part of collecting agencies has further added misery to the situation.
After an eight-year consultation which excluded the voices of micro-businesses, the EU introduced new rules on VAT returns at the beginning of this year, which required digitally delivered services to apply VAT according to the customer’s, not the supplier’s location.
Designed to prevent large businesses locating themselves in VAT-competitive territories, it had the predictable effect of drowning small businesses under a sea of bureaucracy, forcing them to access the data required to prove the customer’s location, figure out which of more than 80 VAT rates to apply, and issue an invoice in the correct language, currency and layout.
Unable to afford the costly software required to deal with the regulation, thousands of small business and sole traders have closed or abandoned their enterprises. Most of those who have continued to trade have either moved to third party platforms, losing up to 70 percent of their total revenue (not just non-domestic sales) in commission, or spent thousands on software.
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Germany has issued VAT numbers to everyone who has submitted a payment to them, and has insisted that in the future returns must be submitted directly to them. ..
The UK has issued demand letters to people it claimed had not made their payments, when they had.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
No, not quite. The FDP supports so-called gay rights (remember that Guido Westerwelle is openly homosexual), only wishes to “reform” welfare rather than abolish it, are pro-”globalization”, do not oppose income tax, are against nuclear power generation, are still mainly pro-EU and for Turkey to join it. And oh yes: they voted against de-Nazification and wanted all war criminals released in the five years after the war ended.
I didn’t assert that the FDP was an analogue of American conservatism, only that it upheld free market principles as understood by American conservatives.
They seem more like libertarians to me, if anything.
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