This book assesses the current EU VAT provisions on electronically supplied services, and makes innovative and practical proposals for ways to address the identified flaws.Winner of the 2015 Maurice ...Lauré Prize awarded by the International Fiscal Association (IFA).
In the autumn of 2016, the CJEU adopted a decision regarding formalism in the context of the exercise of the right to deduct input VAT which does not seem to have attracted the attention of VAT ...scholars, albeit that in the author's view it constitutes a major development. In the Barlis case, the CJEU decided that Article 178(a) of the VAT Directive must be interpreted as precluding the national tax authorities from refusing the right to deduct value added tax solely because the taxable person holds an invoice which does not satisfy the conditions required by Article 226(6) and (7) of that directive, where those authorities have available all the necessary information for ascertaining whether the substantive conditions for the exercise of that right are satisfied. While this decision may, at first sight, be seen as a confirmation of the now established principle of 'substance over form' in relation to the exercise of the right to deduct, in this article the author highlights that this is the first time that this case-law based principle is being used to waive a clear and unconditional formal requirement provided for under the VAT Directive directly in relation to the exercise of the right to deduct.
Les plateformes sont devenues des actrices incontournables du secteur de l’e-commerce. Elles ont également joué un rôle de catalyseur dans le développement du secteur de « l’économie du partage ». ...Leur soumission aux impôts dont les entreprises sont traditionnellement redevables (impôt sur les revenus et TVA) présente aujourd’hui de nouveaux défis. En matière d’impôts sur les revenus, force est de constater que l’évolution du cadre existant, unanimement considéré comme dépassé par rapport à la digitalisation de l’économie, car laissant la porte ouverte à de nombreuses stratégies d’évitement, est très lente et se heurte à de nombreux obstacles juridiques et politiques, que ce soit au niveau international ou même au sein de l’Union européenne. En ce qui concerne la TVA, la situation est plus nuancée, car les plateformes représentent désormais des alliées de choix pour les gouvernements dans le cadre de la protection de leurs recettes TVA, ce qui ne va toutefois pas sans poser de multiples questions juridiques et pratiques. Dans le domaine de l’économie du partage, de nombreuses questions demeurent également ouvertes quant au traitement TVA qu’il convient de réserver aux échanges et autres transactions qui se concluent entre particuliers ainsi qu’au rôle que les plateformes pourraient éventuellement être amenées à jouer dans le cadre de la perception de la taxe.
Soft law has for decades played a role in the largely non-harmonized area of EU direct taxation. It more recently appeared in the harmonised area of EU VAT, with the emergence of the VAT Committee ...guidelines (published since 2012), the adoption of "explanatory notes" by the Commission (for the first time in 2014), and the opinions of the VAT Expert Group (since 2014). Beyond the EU borders, International VAT/GST guidelines are now also being developed under the auspices of the OECD, substantial parts of which have been endorsed by more than 100 states in 2014 and 2015. The objective of this paper is to analyse and assess these four instruments, and to open a discussion on the negative and positive uses that can be made of soft law in an EU harmonised area. The conclusion that we draw from this assessment is that the VAT Committee guidelines and the Commission explanatory notes open the way to "informal governance" in the area of VAT (considered as rather negative) while the VAT Expert Group opinions open the way to an "inclusive" type of governance in this field (considered as very positive).
Should we apply the same VAT rates to digital and paperback publications for the sake of fiscal neutrality? The debate has been raging on for some time but the question has not yet been analysed in ...detail, nor in the literature, nor even by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its recent decisions concerning the application by France and Luxembourg of reduced rates for e-books. This is the objective of this paper, and also the occasion to suggest a new perspective on the scope and objective of the case-law based VAT 'principle of fiscal neutrality'.
The modernization of the EU VAT framework to address the booming development of B2C e-commerce has been one of the flagships of the European Commission 2016 “VAT Action Plan”. With a view to reduce ...the risk of fraud in B2C e-commerce transactions involving goods, new rules imposing new obligations on platforms (wherever they are established) will be applicable from 1 July 2021. These new obligations include the liability to collect VAT and relevant data on underlying supplies. In this article, the authors provide an in-depth analysis of these new obligations and propose a qualitative assessment of their (expected) impact, in terms of compliance burden and potential risk, on the different types of platforms currently active on the market. With this article the authors seek to demonstrate that the EU VAT framework for e-commerce still needs to be improved and that other jurisdictions should think twice before taking the current approach of the European Union as an example.
With regard to the collection of VAT on electronically supplied services, the EU VAT Directive provides for reverse charging (in B2B) and a single registration scheme (in B2C). This paper challenges ...the efficiency of these collection mechanisms in a digital context, and in particular their practicability for suppliers (acting as tax collectors). It also discusses whether they are in compliance with the 1998 OECD recommendations on e-commerce. After noting the current (non-)developments in the context of the European Commission's ambition to reform the EU VAT system and achieve a Digital Single Market by 2020, it sketches three proposals for further discussion.
The European Union has amended its VAT legislation in the early 2000s
with a view to tackle the newly developing e-commerce economy. Specific
provisions for online supplies (“electronically supplied ...services” in EU
languages) were inserted in the EU VAT Directive including as regards the place
of supply (place of taxation) of these transactions. This paper highlights the
important weaknesses of these provisions and in particular the fact that,
although based on widely agreed 1998 OECD recommendations and subsequent
guidelines, the rules result in legal uncertainty and in an unacceptable
compliance burden for suppliers engaging in online supplies, with major
consequences not only for e-suppliers but also for the e-market place as a
whole. Because this situation is likely to worsen in the near future and since
neither the European Union nor the OECD seem to consider revising their initial
approach, this paper will also suggest an alternative approach that could
significantly reduce the compliance burden while at the same time limiting the
potential for fraud.
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