VAT for Greek islands

English forums
1

Apologies if this was already answered, but I couldn’t find an answer.

Bellow quote is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax

[I]“Each Member State’s national VAT legislation must comply with the provisions of EU VAT law as set out in Directive 2006/112/EC. This Directive sets out the basic framework for EU VAT, but does allow Member States some degree of flexibility in implementation of VAT legislation. For example different rates of VAT are allowed in different EU member states. However Directive 2006/112 requires Member states to have a minimum [U]standard rate of VAT[/U] of 15% [U]and one or two reduced rates[/U] not to be below 5%. [U]Some Member States have a 0% VAT rate on certain supplies[/U]- these Member States would have agreed this as part of their EU Accession Treaty (for example, newspapers and certain magazines in Belgium). The current maximum rate in operation in the EU is 25%, though member states are free to set higher rates.”[/I]

That means max 4 VAT rates (1 standard, up to 2 reduced and up to 1 zero-rate). However, in my country (Greece) for sales to entities based in certain Aegean islands our one standard and two reduced VAT rates are reduced by 30% (ie 23%->16%, 11%->8% and 5.5%->4%). As an example, if my B2C customer was based in Athens he would pay 23% VAT for a certain product while if the customer was based in the island of Paros he would pay 16% VAT for the same product. AFAICT no other EU country has such a complicated implementation of VAT but for me it is an issue.

This begs the question of how I should deal with it. Any suggestions?

PS: I noticed that that the rule of max 4 VAT rates applies even for non-EU countries (at least according to the wikipedia page above).

At the moment there is a “Default VAT for all Products” defined in
Master settings -> Core settings -> Settings -> VAT -> Default VAT for all Products
and an optional “Spec. VAT” per product defined in
Administer products -> products -> [product selection] -> Main -> Spec. VAT

Maybe it would make sense to have 3 (or maybe more ?) fields for an equal number of VAT rates (ie “VAT1”, “VAT2”, “VAT3”) plus a zero-VAT in place of the “Default VAT for all Products” with a per product “Spec. VAT” optional override. Then one would choose which of these applies to each product with, say, “VAT1” being the default. This would centralize management of VAT rates and make changes easier.

2

Hi tm,

really sounds complicated over there… Please have a look at this blog post. It might explain the full issue:
http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/news/blog/new-module-in-exchange-country-specifix-tax

Regards

3

I gad seen that module again but (without actually having tried it) the only thing that came to mind back then was creating two “countries” (ie “Greece - Mainland” and “Greece - Islands”). The user should have to chose one of these and, with the above module, he/she would be charged the right VAT. It may work but I wouldn’t call it an elegant solution.

As a sidenote, I think that OXID is kind of ‘country based’ as opposed to some competitors that are ‘zone based’ (a ‘zone’ been whatever: a country, a group of countries or part of a country). Even without my country’s byzantine regulations, one might, as an example, want to charge different transport fees for the same product, delivered to different locations within the same destination country (ie, I should imagine that a Spanish eshop would charge less for shipping a product to mainland Spain than to Canary Islands).

On the other hand, I understand that the disadvantages (programming effort, complexity of configuring and administering the shop etc) may outweigh the advantages or that quite probably, been a newbie with shopping carts in general, I haven’t figured out how to configure OXID properly.