VAT MOSS

Ghost announced it will be moving its company headquarters to Singapore. John O’Nolan one of the founders said, “we’ve wasted tens of thousands of dollars and months of development time [on VAT MOSS] when we should have been making the products we set out to build”.

In the latest issue of The business of Digital Products, Rachel Andrew, a founder of Perch, said that her experience mirrors Johns.

“At the time we became aware of the full implications of the legislation we had an almost ready to ship marketplace for Perch Addons. It still hasn’t launched, partly because our time was burned up getting ourselves ready for VAT MOSS and partly because we would need to make sure that we coped with the situation for anyone selling through our system.”, Rachel said.

The tax situation in America on software companies is unclear as well. I work for a distributed company and I had the task of building out our online store. Anywhere we have a presence, an employee, we have to charge tax. Then it depends on the state on how its charged, some are charged based on county inside the state, others are just the entire state. Not to mention the big confusion around if SaaS apps should charge taxes–most don’t but probably should be. If you’d like to find out more about American software taxes a good place to start is this post on Nexus by Ian Landsman.

The moral of the story. Hire an accountant and pray you don’t get audited.