The E-VAT Directive: Mitigating Tax Competition or Spurring It

Abstract. Turnover taxes are generally considered to be risk-free from the tax competition point of view, for they are levied exclusively at the place of consumption. The Value-Added Tax (VAT) imposed by all European Union (EU) member states, though, has become a source of distortion in the trans-Atlantic trade: non-EU suppliers of electronic services were not required to collect the VAT, while their EU competitors were. The level playing field in EU’s foreign trade in electronic services was restored in 2002 by the so-called e-VAT Directive that obliged non-EU providers of electronic services to charge the VAT at the rate of the member state their consumer resides in. This paper argues that besides being largely unenforceable, the Directive has created another misbalance in the infra-EU electronic commerce. It is being demonstrated that since the Directive is not applicable to EU vendors, non-EU businesses can and do circumvent it by establishing daughter companies in EU jurisdictions with the lowest VAT rates and thus spur the infra-EU tax competition. 1. Tax competition in turnover taxes The Value-Added Tax (VAT) is universally considered less exposed to the risk of harmful tax competition than direct taxes and especially corporate income taxes. There are several reasons for this. First, turnover tax bases are generally less mobile than those of the income tax. Although trans-border shopping has been known for quite a while now, consumers are normally less inventive in matters of tax minimization than entrepreneurs