Greece
During April, Greece’s Ministry of Finance put forward a proposal to introduce a domestic reverse charge on the sale of constructions services in the country. If implemented, the new mechanism will mean that businesses involved in making these types of supplies will no longer have to charge VAT to business customers. Instead, it will be the customers’ responsibility to account for the VAT in their own returns. This removes the need to make cash payments in relation to the VAT element of the transaction, which is often prevalent to fraud.
Greece already operates the domestic reverse charge on a range of VAT fraud-sensitive sectors, including:
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mobile phones, laptops
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electricity
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certain scrap materials
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carbon trading certificates
Finland
The Finnish government has confirmed that its standard VAT rate will increase from 24% to 25.5% and is expected to come into effect sometime in 2024.
This increase will make the Finnish standard VAT rate the second highest in the EU with only Hungary’s VAT rate beating this at 27%.
The 14% and 10% reduced VAT rates will remain unchanged.
Switzerland
The Swiss tax authorities are proposing a further increase to the standard VAT rate in the country from 8.1% to 8.5%.
This proposal is being put forward to cover the pension deficit caused by a national referendum vote to increase state pensions.
Switzerland already raised its standard VAT rate on 1 January 2024 from 7.7% to 8.1%.
The above news was kindly provided by Fiscal Solutions (UK), www.fiscalsolutions.co.uk; contact: [email protected].
