Towards a one stop shop for cross-border VAT compliance

European Commission. Common rules are proposed for the one stop shop which will be in place as of 2015. It will first apply to telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services and could be extended to other sectors in the future.

Article 397 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC1 (hereinafter “the VAT Directive”) provides that “the Council, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission, shall adopt the measures necessary to implement this Directive”.

On that basis, the Council adopted Council Regulation (EU) No 282/20112, which provides binding rules on the application of certain provisions of the VAT Directive and – inter alia – gave legal certainty to a number of non-binding guidelines agreed by the VAT Committee since 1977.

Large elements of Regulation No 282/2011 are composed of provisions which relate to the adoption of Directive 2008/8/EC3. Article 5 of that Directive contains legal changes concerning the special schemes for telecommunications, broadcasting or electronic services supplied to non-taxable persons by suppliers not established in the Member State of taxation.

Regulation No 282/2011 currently does not provide for any implementing measure related to those provisions which will come into force as of 2015. Therefore it is necessary to adapt that Regulation in order to establish binding rules on the application of the respective provisions of the VAT Directive.

These measures should be adopted by Council as soon as possible and in any case by the middle of 2012, in order to enable the Commission and the Member States to agree on the functional and technical specifications of the IT systems that need to be built for the implementation of these special schemes.

The proposed measures only relate to those aspects (definitions, scope of the schemes, reporting obligations, identification, exclusion, VAT returns, currency, payments, records) for which a common understanding is needed before designing the IT systems. Other measures, notably relating to the determination of the location of the customer, will be proposed by the Commission at a later stage. 

Only Section 2 of Chapter XI of Regulation No 282/2011 needs to be amended.

Proposal for a COUNCIL REGULATION amending Implementing Regulation (EU) No 282/2011 as regards the special schemes for non-established taxable persons supplying telecommunications services, broadcasting services or electronic services to non-taxable persons x