charles wrote:
In ,
] wrote:
In , Adrian
writes
On Wed, 18 Feb 2015 11:04:32 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Seems to me that the current way of dealing with other EU countries
is by far and away the easier one. Unless, of course, you really
believe that the UK would get shot of any kind of
value-added/goods-and-services/ purchase/sales tax if we left the
EU?

Can't see that happening, not least because it would leave a roughly
£100bn hole in the Gov'ts income each year that'd need to be filled
with something else.

Yes, sales tax.

Other than the name, care to explain the difference?

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015...hrive-outside-
the-european-union/

interesting article.

...written by one of the most profoundly anti-EU of MEPs, outside of
UKIP. So hardly an unbiased reflection.

But about the difference between a sales tax and a value-added tax?
AIUI vat involves a transaction at every stage of the process that fails
to generate any revenue until finally what ever it is that's being sold
goes to someone or some organisation that is not Vat registered. So the
net revenue gained by HMRC per recorded vat transaction can be very low.
It is cost effective for HMRC as all they have to do is police it. It is
very inefficient especially for any small business operating manual
accounts as they are constantly recording VAT transactions which cancel
each other out. Fortunately computerised accounting systems mitigate
much of the cost.
A sales tax is applied once only at the final point of sale. In the past
purchase tax was made unnecessarily complicated by the socialist
insisting on different rates for different classes of goods.

and when you, as a non-trader, bought something from a wholesaler the
accounting became interesting "Where's the purchase tax book?"

The wholesaler IME had already paid the purchase tax which was applied
at source. Hence a lower selling price did not reduce the tax paid.