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Looking forward to figures from Friso - and a confirmation frome enterprises in general that Single Market harmonised - and full - collection of VAT is important also for them.

Looking forward to figures from Friso - and a confirmation frome enterprises in general that Single Market harmonised - and full - collection of VAT is important also for them.

If this would not be all-in-all beneficial for SMEs - then we should find ways to compensate - instead of shooting down something that is so beneficial for society at large.

When analysing the negative cash flow aspects for enterprises - and positive for tax (= all tax payers) - it would be useful to calculate how big the VAT-loans are - and how much alternative financing would cost. In the 500k, 1m, 5m, 10m, 100m and 500m turnover cases. You probably have these figures Friso?

The target for us in the Real Time Economy program (in Finland) is to raise the EC target of cutting enterprise administrative costs with 25% by 2012 to 50% by 2015. There is a long list of actions - most of them based on using structured data in e-invoicing. Split payment of VAT is one of them and was developed some time ago already and has been refined since.

The experts engaged in our work have come to the conclusion that the benefits for enterprises are much bigger than disadvantages and naturally enterprises will want to contribute to the building of the Single Market, more efficient collection of VAT, cost savings in the public sector and better rule of law - in return tax payers can expect a lower tax burden.

The 1,5 months that the VAT is on loan is not a sound form of financing and does not have much impact in an SME. Crisis financing can be organized in other ways if needed.

If you read it and also looked into the timetable in the PWC paper you would not make these comments. Invoices are paid by bank transfers - and a split payment does not change the relationship.

Please read the arguments.

Hi Antti,

There is now a global ISO standard in place for the payment reference (thanks to Olli Kähkönen at Nordea). One step has been taken. The next one is to implement it.

Agree that 2011 will be an important year - but see the breakthrough coming from a somewhat unexpected angle - the notification services becoming bidirectional - get notification about e-invoice and approve for payment by pressing "a" - both for private and SME customers. This will then proceed to other proposals and with real time payments become an alternative also for merchants (merger of e-commerce payments and e-invoicing - automating accounting on both sides..)

Off course cash usage would decline faster if ATM withdrawals would be charged for - also in Finland.