REACH - what a load of Euro bollox

serious

The new limit is 120.000 eur on purchasing side I believe, it is higher on selling side. They are literally forcing you to go look for material sources outside EU, those don't count towards limit and you don't have to report them.

It is not that much work, but it takes a few precious hours away per month. Hours that could be spent doing something productive.

And once you're in you have to wait for next evaluation cycle. So if you're in for 12 months due to some single extra sweet deal you made you could be in for 16 months or more. Frustrating.

Mark

Good post, I agree completely. You forgot to mention Greece, Portugal and most new members :)

serious

Multiply the fine by the probability of being audited, and that's the probable expense of ignoring them.

If we complied with every law on the books, or even knew about every law on the books, I'd need sixteen lawyers on staff.

John

serious

The basic fine is not down to being audited. If you don't return the form on time the fine is automatic. Of course you could ignore some of the data and not put it on the form.

The basic information that tells them to send you a form comes from the VAT (tax) return. The INTRASTAT form needs to agree with the tax return. HM Revenue and Customs do routine (every few years) audits of companies. A wise man does not mess with these guys.

That's very true. The "EC Sales" figure on the VAT return must match the "EC Sales List" figure exactly, otherwise you will probably get a VAT inspection.

And every VAT # on the latter list needs to be valid - they do OCR on them and validate them.

My guess would be that if you use an accounting package to do the VAT and ECSL, could this not squirt out the Intrastat data at the same time?

My experience of the VAT people has been very positive - unlike the Inland Revenue who nowadays are a load of opportunist aggressive crooks who work on the principle that every successful businessman will offer a settlement to get them off his ar*e.

Somebody in electronic manuacturing, with enough component usage to maybe hit the Intrastat threshold, is spending easily enough to make importation from the USA worthwhile - even at present exchange rates.

I am buying vast numbers of US-made ferrite cores in India... the US company sells them out there at a very good price. Half of the European distributor's price. I just love doing this stuff :)

x----------x

Don'y tell my wife youv'e had good experiences. She had a row with the VAT people the other day. She paid about £35000 on time and then noticed she had mistyped the number and paid another £36 one day late. She went ballistic when she received a penalty notice for late payment. Didn't help, the VAT man stuck to his guns and did't rescind the penalty notice.

serious

The guy from INTRASTAT calls me every month if I forget to fill out one of the fields on the form.

Ignoring them is not an option. They are crazy.

Yep, pretty much.

Exactly, the EU is giving you incentive to go and buy outside EU. Beats logic, but that's the way it is.

Yep, every vat id number needs to be checked at time of issuing invoice. A valid id can be invalid tomorrow, some companies do this to avoid tax somehow. Thankfully a convenient free online tool for checking vat id numbers exists. Invalid vatid on invoice guarantees a call from the taxman and could mean tax audit, usually nasty experience that is best avoided.

Mark

What was the damage?

Nothing this time. That's our spare life used up. We can't have even the smallest screw up for a year, and this one was a pretty small screw up.

serious

Wow. In over 20 years in business, I think we have had maybe ten visits from inspectors of some sort, not counting the building inspectors when we did major construction. Most of those were Workmen's Compensation insurance audits, no big deal. Mostly we (our accountants, actually) fill out tax forms and send them in to the state and the Feds, along with the tax payments of course. The data we supply is gross totals, like total revenue, total value of inventory, but no part-by-part detail, no specific lists of transactions. They have the right to audit us, but unless the numbers look fishy it's not very likely that they ever will.

There seems, in recent years, to be a tacit appreciation here that it's not a good idea to chase away businesses. Most of the government people we deal with are friendly and reasonable.

John

We had one tax audit and do not want to go through the ordeal again, if possible. It is far less painful to pay tax to a friendly and reasonable government.

See "Soviet Union". >:->

Cheers! Rich