The Value Added Tax on Electronic Commerce in the European Union

This paper concludes that any failure to apply value-added tax (VAT) to electronic commerce crossing borders between EU Member States and other countries should not affect the VAT liability of registered traders, even if the reverse charge rule (taxation in the hands of recipients) is not applied. The only type of e-commerce that is problematic involves sales of digital content to consumers and unregistered traders. However, such sales constitute a minuscule fraction of purchases by households and unregistered traders (given the extremely low level of small-business exemptions). Thus, while many believe that the question of how to tax e-commerce under the VAT is urgent, how it is resolved may not be very important.