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bflesch 6 days ago

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.