Directive 2020/284 - Amendment of Directive 2006/112/EC as regards introducing certain requirements for payment service providers - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 62/7

Council Directive 2006/112/EC (3) lays down the general value added tax (VAT) accounting obligations for taxable persons.

The growth of electronic commerce (‘e-commerce’) facilitates the cross-border sale of goods and services to final consumers in the Member States. In that context, cross-border e-commerce refers to supplies upon which the VAT is due in a Member State, but the supplier is established in another Member State, in a third territory or in a third country. However, fraudulent businesses exploit e-commerce opportunities in order to gain unfair market advantages by evading their VAT obligations. Where the principle of taxation at destination applies, since consumers have no accounting obligations, the Member States of consumption need appropriate tools to detect and control such fraudulent businesses. It is important to combat cross-border VAT fraud caused by the fraudulent behaviour of some businesses in the area of cross-border e-commerce.

For the vast majority of online purchases made by consumers in the Union, payments are executed through payment service providers. In order to provide payment services, a payment service provider holds specific information to identify the recipient, or payee, of the payment together with details of the date, the amount and the Member State of origin of the payment as well as of whether the payment was initiated at the physical premises of the merchant. That specific information is particularly important in the context of a cross-border payment where the payer is located in one Member State and the payee is located in another Member State, in a third territory or in a third country. Such information is necessary for the tax authorities of the Member States (the ‘tax authorities’) to carry out their basic tasks of detecting fraudulent businesses and controlling VAT liabilities. It is therefore necessary that payment service providers make that information available to the tax authorities to help them detect and combat cross-border VAT fraud.

To combat VAT fraud, it is important to require payment service providers to keep sufficiently detailed records and to report certain cross-border payments determined as such by reason of the location of the payer and the location of the payee. It is therefore necessary to define the concepts of location of the payer and location of the payee and also the means to identify those locations. The location of the payer and of the payee should only trigger the record keeping and reporting obligations for the payment service providers which are established in the Union and those obligations should be without prejudice to the rules laid down in Directive 2006/112/EC and in Council Implementing Regulation (EU) No 282/2011 (4) as regards the place of a taxable transaction.

On the basis of information they already hold, payment service providers are able to identify the location of the payee and the payer in relation to the payment services they provide, using an identifier of the payer’s or the payee’s payment account or any other identifier which unambiguously identifies, and...