Things as certain as Death and Taxes, can be more firmly believ’d.
—Daniel Defoe The Political History of the Devil 1726.

The world of e-commerce taxation is changing, governments have taken their time to catch up with the web but now they are this session will give you all the information you need to know about world wide changes.

Tax Avoidance

Europe

Amazon, Apple iTunes, etc are all based in Luxembourg to take advantage of a current VAT loophole where electronic services eg e-books are taxed at the place of supplier rather than the customer. For e-books this means 5%, rather than the 20% it would be if they were based in the UK.

Japan

Similar to Amazon, Rakuten Japan’s biggest retailer of e-book readers acquired Canadian e-book retailer Kobo to sell e-books to its customers avoiding Japanese consumption tax. Japan estimates it is missing out on €180m per year in tax revenues.

Closing the loophole

The EU, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and South Africa have or are implementing changes to their VAT systems requiring foreign suppliers of electronic services to register locally and collect local VAT for resident customers.

HMRC (UK) estimates that 34,000 business will be affected in the UK alone and it will increase its tax revenues by £300m in 2016.

What you will learn

• Why these changes are being made
• What the changes are
• How they might affect your business or your customers
• What you need to do to implement the changes