UK digital providers 6-month holiday on customer info
- Dec 28, 2014 | Richard Asquith
The UK's HMRC has granted micro providers of digital services a six-month transition period on meeting the exact requirements of the EU customer residency information rules.
Under the new 2015 B2C EU VAT rules for providers of electronic, broadcast and telephony services to consumers, EU-based providers must now charge the VAT rate of their customers' country. Previously they only had to charge the VAT rate of their own country. The European Union has provided detailed rules on the levels of information required to prove the country of residency, including up to three pieces of non-conflicting information.
The new rules had placed the biggest burden on UK micro-businesses (businesses not UK VAT registered because they are below the UK's £81,000 per annum VAT registration threshold) who will now be forced to VAT register to report their EU sales through the MOSS portal. Earlier this month, the UK had conceded that micro-businesses would only report EU digital services VAT.
To help these businesses to adjust, HMRC has this week allowed such micro-businesses to forego the requirement to capture all the non-conflicting information until after 1 July 2015.
