EU Commissioner VP Andrus Ansip making a formal statement in the Parliamentary debate about EU VAT agreed that the consequences of the Digital VAT legislation are severe for small businesses and that the additional administration it brings is something they cannot manage.
This admission is a huge achievement and a million miles from the ‘there, there, dear, just calm down’ responses so many of us received in December 2014 through to February this year.
In last night’s speech, Ansip said the EU VAT rules are still mainly a UK problem. Although there is evidence that it is EU-wide the UK has been the most vocal about the need to reverse the rule change.
In March 2015, Ansip and VP Frans Timmermans promised to urgently remove the burden of this legislation from Small Businesses, which was brilliant news. In various speeches since then, VP Ansip has also confirmed that he understands the huge urgency of this problem and wants to protect micro businesses and SMEs from the unintended damaging consequences.
However, in last night’s speech, VP Ansip said that the proposed threshold will only be €100,000 (about £71,000), instead of protecting micro businesses (Holding Letter by Shutterstock
