Thank you all so much for your support last week when I was at the Fiscalis Summit.

Here is a summary of how it went and what our next steps are:

In summary: there was widespread agreement that the implementation of the EU Digital VAT rules has hit the smallest businesses very hard. There was also widespread support of a cross-border sales threshold, below which you would revert to domestic VAT rules, plus a ‘soft landing’ threshold above that, with all reasonable simplifications available to make the start of complying with these rules more reasonable.

However, the support was NOT unanimous. And it would need to be, to pass it as legislation.

The EU Commission will propose legislation in late 2016, to potentially bring in thresholds and simplifications. But that is still a year away. And it could take 2-5 years after that to debate and agree the proposals.

What we need is an interim suspension of these rules NOW for micro businesses, to allow them to keep trading while the political wheels do their turning.

To move us forwards, we are now translating and analysing the EU-wide quantitative survey that we launched in March. We need support with translating these responses for analysis and then translating the summary reports, please.

Once we have these, it will be another all-hands-on-deck for writing to MEPs and Finance Ministers, to tell them how badly we need an interim suspension.

Also, the OECD is proposing an EU-style ‘place of supply’ VAT change to be applied worldwide and they are meeting with G20 Finance Ministers in Lima in October. We urgently need to meet with the UK’s David Gauke (Treasury Secretary) or Chancellor George Osborne, to make sure they understand the gravity of the problem, first hand.

If you have contacts who could help to set up this meeting (they are well-protected by the Civil Servants with whom we have been working 😉 ), please let us know.

Thank you so much for your on-going support. We are making progress – great progress – even though it may feel slow at times compared to the fast-pace at which a micro business can move, compared to the EU legislative machine!

We would love to see you over at our friendly Facebook group. Please let us know if you have any new news.

x Clare & the EU VAT Action Team