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Tax rates


Robin Somes

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Using CC v 6.05 and the All-In-One Shipping extension, I'm defining VAT rules, and there are a series of anomalies, which don't exactly inspire confidence.

1. When I set a new Tax Rule, and tick the 'Assign to European Union?' box, 3 countries are missing from the set of tax rules newly created; Belgium, the UK and Greece.

2. In the drop-down list of available countries, the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey appear, but Alderney, Sark and Herm do not; so we are unable to set a tax rule for them.

3. In the same drop-down list of countries, Angola and Armenia are also missing. Possibly several others are too, but because of (4) below it's too much hassle to go through the whole list and check. 

4. The same list is also not A-Z sorted, so it's pretty frustrating trying to track down a country.

5. Moving on to the All-In-One Shipping extension. The same islands/countries are missing from the drop-down list: Alderney, Sark, Herm, Angola, Armenia, and quite possibly more. So apparently we can't ship to any of those.

6. Still in All-In-One Shipping; on the Shipping Zones tab, deleting a shipping zone using the little trash can symbol takes me back to the 'Manage Plugins' page, but doesn't actually delete the shipping zone, no matter how many times I do it.

Any comments or clarification on these?

Moving on to a specific problem with our sales. We sell all around the world, a range of software - both downloadable and on CD - plus printed books, and e-books on CD. Under the irksome new EU rules, we are supposed to charge VAT on digital goods at the rate in the customer's own country. Problem. E-books in the UK are charged at 20%, whereas in France, they're Reduced-rated at 5.5% VAT, and in Italy, at 4%. But in the product details for e-book X, I can only set one tax rate.  I *could* set up Tax Classes for each of the 28 EU nations - some of which have 5 different rates - and then add the percentages for each as Tax Rules. That's a lot of tax rules. But how do I make sure that Dave in the UK gets charged 20%, and Pierre in France, 5.5%? Same with printed books; zero-rated in the UK, 6% in Sweden.

Our immediate response is to carry on as we always did pre-2015 and charge everyone in the EU the UK rates. But is there any elegant solution?

TIA, Robin

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Welcome Robin Somes! Glad to see you made it to the forums.

I recall reading some conversations about the digital goods VAT debacle (and most of it didn't make sense to me). But I recall someone saying they read something somewhere that the government realizes not all ecommerce stores are equipped to handle this disparate range of taxes and so enforcement will not be heavy-handed. What that actually means, I don't know. I would say any solution, elegant or otherwise, would require re-writing much of CubeCart's tax calculations.

We can work on finding out why countries are not being listed in alpha-order.

We have discovered that the ALL-in-One module does not scale well in that, as more zones are added, the amount of webform data submitted back to the server grows exponentially. There will come a point where the amount of POST data exceeds the limit set by the web server. So, if you have a couple dozen zones with a fair number of rules in each zone, you will need to contact your hosting provider and ask that bump up the limit of POST variables.

 

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Thanks; the new EU law is a nightmare, but for the moment, ignoring it seems to work ;) 

Even so, simply setting Standard and Zero-rated UK tax rules (20% / 0%), and duplicating that over 25 EU countries plus 2 Channel islands still gives me 56 individual tax rules - without even looking to see if I need to set a 'Rest Of World' rule as well. I'll look in to upping the number of POST variables, as suggested.

If you can track down Belgium, Greece, Angola and Armenia, plus the other Channel Islands, that would be great. They're not our greatest customers, but we've no wish to upset them unnecessarily :)

Robin

 

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On a fresh database, Serbia, Montenegro, Guernsey, and Jersey would be the only countries out of alpha-order.

There is a mistake in the installation routines for why Belgium, Greece and UK are not flagged as being in the EU, but that's easily fixed. In admin, Countries/Zones, check the EU box for those countries.

As for Alderney, Sark and Herm (and Jethou and Lihou), do they really constitute defined delivery destinations and/or taxable entities apart from Guernsey?

 

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Hi,

Thanks for your reply; have added Belgium Greece and UK to the EU - I hadn't twigged that I could do that.

In my Tax Rules tab, just the 'A' section of the countries runs:
Andorra

United Arab Emirates

Afghanistan

Antigua

Anguilla

Albania

Netherlands Antilles

Antarctica

Argentina

American Samoa

Austria

Australia

Aruba

Azerbaijan

and the rest follow in an equally disordered fashion :(

As for the minor Channel Islands, just like Jersey and Guernsey, they aren't subject to VAT, so they certainly need to exist and be distinct from the UK and EU if the shop is to calculate their tax liability correctly. It would make more sense, perhaps, to have a single entity, 'Channel Islands', that encompasses all of the islands. I've created a custom country to do that, but maybe it could be included in an updated version?

Edited by Robin Somes
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