[ic] Tax Problems

Mark Bryant interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Tue Sep 24 12:27:00 2002


Hi Lyn ;o)

At 17:40 24/09/2002, you wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 15:54:53 +0100, Mark Bryant wrote:
>
> >
> >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)
>
>Hmm .. my local UK HMCE office told me something a little different.
>Don't you just love bureaucrats?

Hmmm now where did I put my machine gun?

>They said that they have different categories of goods and services,
>and for the category I specifically asked about (I run an Interchange
>hosting and consulting business) I could safely assume that the end
>users were businesses and they did not have to prove it.
>
>I believe it would be correct though that in cases where there may be
>doubt as to whether the end use is personal or business, then you
>would need to obtain proof in the form of a valid VAT number. I also
>enquired as to some formula which could be used to determine the
>validity of a VAT number, but it turns out that every country has
>different formats, Ireland even has 2 valid formats, and they claimed
>to know of nothing beyond their paper tables for checking this. This was
>quite some time ago, maybe things have changed ..

Then I have another handy URL for you. This page supposedly checks any EEC 
VAT registration number for validity.

http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/taxation_customs/vies/en/vieshome.htm

Perhaps someone could write some perl or a module that uses this page to 
obtain live results?

Sadly the function doesn't tell you WHO the VAT number belongs to, which 
would be much more useful I'm sure, so you still need to do background if 
you suspect the customer is dodgy, but it's better than nothing :o)

It worked fine on my own VAT numbers and for many others I've tried for 
German, Dutch and Spanish companies. It's also alerted me to people who are 
just trying it on to get 0% VAT on their order. These days I don't accept 
an order from anyone claiming EEC VAT registration unless it passes this 
test and I can also verify the company name associated with the number in 
some way.

> >>  - put the rates into salestax.asc, with tax set to 'country'.
>
>This is my salestax.asc (tab separated)
>================
>country rate
>UK      0.175
>=================
>and in catalog.cgf:
>=============
>SalesTax         country
>=================

I'll try those out and many thanks for letting me have them.

But, I do still have one small question about the line (default [fly-tax]) 
that's currently in salestax.asc. Should I remove it before putting in this 
new data? I've really no idea what it does or why/how it got there in the 
first place. Perhaps it might be why the tax is currently being miscalculated?

When I set up the tax (as per the instructions I was following) i was told 
to put the following into the TAX DATA field

default = 17.5%, food = 0

I'm wondering if the default mentioned here is being 
used/interpreted/conflicting with the default in salestax.asc in some way 
and causing this?

Many thanks

Mark



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