This is off-topic to their grand blockchain adventures, but I need to mention it:

I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).

But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.

Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.

Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.

If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.

It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.

▲

woah 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

How can an invoice "not be legal" if it records a transaction? Sounds like your jurisdiction is requiring superfluous formatting rules, but I don't see how that's anyone's problem except for yours.

You're trying to get Stripe to force merchants to conform to some arbitrary document format for an invoice that isn't even part of Stripe's transaction flow, based on a regex on emails for certain TLDs?? Is Stripe the world's paperwork policeman?

Maybe just don't order from merchants who won't supply you documents in the format you like, instead of trying to get Stripe to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the court of Stripe. Or talk to your government representatives and get them to lift these rules so you can do business like everyone else in the world.

▲

bflesch 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The invoice needs to state who is the seller. The payment goes to Stripe, and me and my tax accountant and the European tax authorities have zero transparency where the money goes after this. Am I buying a service from a US businessman just trying to skirt the IRS or from a maybe sanctioned third country? What jurisdiction applies to my relationship with a specific website offering a subscription?

So if Stripe doesn't force their merchants to provide an invoice which has company name, company address (jurisdiction!) and company registration number (for me to check if it actually exists) then the invoice is rubbish and to be used as toilet paper.

Simple principle, but in my interactions with Stripe they fight tooth and nail to implement and/or enforce it. And even if their merchants "enable" Stripe invoices then Stripe doesn't stop them from putting random addresses into the forms.

Of course the shitty-invoice merchants often have domain privacy enabled and self-claim to reside in a country without any imprint laws on their website. You can pay to them with VISA/Mastercard via Stripe but have no idea which country they are in. Stripe knows exactly in which country both seller and buyer are located at the time of transaction, and they do not use that information to apply the proper tax rate to the transactions. Also even if you show them that a merchant has been skirting VAT payments for years I think they do not force the merchant to state proper invoices for all impacted transactions during that timeframe.

In my opinion these are systemic compliance deficiencies at Stripe and the lack of technological remedies for this problem is apparent (like checking email TLDs to see if customer is in EU). It result in a significant tax theft problem negatively affecting EU member states.

▲

flyer23 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You call a pdf,converted from google sheet, with some random number, product name and price an invoice? This is kids scamming on taxes, they do not want to be catched and Stripe do not care as long as they get paid they share. That is whole US lately, fck regulations and make money.

	▲	woah 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In the US, you are required to pay taxes on your income. If the IRS takes an interest in you and you are not able to prove in court that you properly paid taxes on the income you turned into your assets, they will take all your money. None of this has anything to do with the format of any invoices. If you wrote a receipt on a piece of toilet paper, that's fine as long as you can prove that you then sent 30-50% of the money you received to the US government. I believe this is more generally a feature of common law legal systems which prioritize honest intentions over box-checking. Whatever other requirements exist in other countries are not really a US business's concern, unless those countries start turning their merchandise away at the border. In any case, expecting a random payment processor to act as world paperwork policeman for the EU is hilariously ridiculous.

▲

tobltobs 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People on HN fighting for the EU VAT clusterfuck ... wasn't on my Bingo card.

	▲	bflesch 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Neither of us made the tax rules, but they exist and we need to follow them. When I would sell to US consumers I'd also try to do it in a legally and tax compliant manner - even if it is only out of respect towards my customers in that country to not make them any trouble.