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offshore company selling digital services to EU customers, VAT

mr782292

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Feb 9, 2022
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I have an offshore company and I sell digital services to EU customers. From the research I made, my company is supposed to be charging and paying VAT. How can I start doing it without being somehow flagged and questioned about the past? At the beginning when they added this new VAT rule, the company was not exceeding thresholds. But then it started exceeding them and right now it not only exceeded the threshold but they also simply removed those thresholds completely in July 2021.

I would like to start paying this tax but I don't want to register for VAT and learn next week that they are asking me for 2021 and other years... If they ask me to pay for the past period including high-interest rates, i might go bankrupt.

Is there any safe way to do it? How likely they are to find by themselves that Im not charging customers with VAT anyway? annual turnover is around 200 000 EUR so it's not huge business (I have to pay the bills etc, it's not my profit). Im selling digital services but the payment processors I use is from EU.

The only way I think they could find out is when auditing this payment processor internal database seeing how much each non-eu business is earing per month and then going after assets located in EU of those companies. I do have some assets in EU like some servers.

I have found this E-commerce: Council adopts new rules for exchange of VAT payment data

Does it mean until they implement it, I'm relatively safe or should I register ASAP anyway? The date they plan to implement it is January 2024.
I do consider selling my business too, so if I decide to sell it, I don't think it's worth the effort to start charging VAT since my customers will be migrated to EU company anyway and I will close mine. Unless there is high risk I will get caught before 2024... So the question is, if I'm ok waiting a year or 1.5 year and then selling my business without even registering for VAT at all?

Nobody will give me a guarantee but maybe someone knows what is the usual practice? How often do they find those small businesses and fine them...
 
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I would like to start paying this tax but I don't want to register for VAT and learn next week that they are asking me for 2021 and other years... If they ask me to pay for the past period including high-interest rates, i might go bankrupt.
If you register your company in the Seychelles or Belize no one will ever ask for VAT even if they apply this rule worldwide, you can give a flying s... about it ;)