[ic] Tax Problems

Mark Bryant interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Tue Sep 24 10:55:01 2002


Hi Lyn,

Thanks for your response :o)

At 15:48 24/09/2002, you wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 14:08:59 +0100, Mark Bryant wrote:
>
> >Hi to all you IC gurus out there :o)
> >
> >I'm setting interchange up to work in a UK/GB shopping environment, but
> >notice that despite having set ALL my products to be NON TAXABLE, when you
> >hit the checkout page and UK is the shipping country, the VAT of 17.5% is
> >still being added to the order.
> >
> >I followed the instructions found at this URL to the letter and everything
> >works as expected, except for the tax:
> >
> >http://www.webmaint.net/interchange/uksetup.html
> >
> >Does anyone have any ideas why the tax settings for my products are being
> >ignored and still being calculated for the UK by IC when it shouldn't be?
> >
> >It is my understanding that if the tax field is set to NO on an
> >item/product, it should then be exempt from the tax calculations. Only
> >those set to YES should be included. This doesn't appear to be the case.
>
>Apologies for the silly question, but you *did* restart the daemon?

Yes I did restart the daemon, it was the first thing I did :o)

I must be missing something really silly here :o(

> >Also, this tax setup is not quite right/comprehensive enough as UK VAT also
> >applies to sales made to customers in EEC countries when selling from the
> >UK. Is there any way I can get IC to use the REGION code (Europe-EC) rather
> >than the individual COUNTRY codes and therefore cover all the EEC countries
> >in one go? I'm trying to avoid putting a tax rule for each country as it
> >seems there should already be a better method of dealing with this.
>
>You only apply VAT to EC sales if the product is for personal use.
>Otherwise, if the product/service is for business use then the customer
>is liable for VAT. Rates vary across the EC, so you can't just have
>one entry

Actually that's not quite true - Well not according to my local UK VAT 
office, whom I checked with before i started out and hope would know what 
they are talking about where UK VAT is concerned :o)

Anyway, they say:

All sales to EEC countries are charged 17.5% VAT on sales FROM the UK (for 
delivery in the EEC) UNLESS the purchaser is a company AND provides a VAT 
(or equivalent) number at point of sale. If the VAT number is provided, 
then the VAT is rated at 0% and the VAT/TAX that the purchasing company now 
"owes" is obtained by the taxation system in their local country. If a VAT 
registered company fails to provide their VAT/TAX number at point of sale 
they are to be taxed at 17.5% like a normal domestic sale within the EEC.

The tax office offered me 2 URLS where this is allegedly explained in more 
detail and they concur with the above.

Domestic sales from UK to EEC countries
http://www.hmce.gov.uk/business/tradinginternet/tradinter-15.htm

Business (VAT registered companies) sales from UK to EEC countries
http://www.hmce.gov.uk/business/tradinginternet/tradinter-16.htm


>  - put the rates into salestax.asc, with tax set to 'country'.

I hate to sound daft, but do you have an example of how to do this please ? 
ATM my salestax.asc contains only this line/item and isn't much to work from.

default [fly-tax]


> >
> >If it helps, I'm using IC installed from these 2 rpms:
> >
> >interchange-foundation-4.8.6-1
> >interchange-4.8.6-1
> >


Many thanks

Mark



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