Yes, the VAT mess definitely does not deserve the beauty prize but with the MOSS it is actually manageable. I've done it for a couple of years and as long as your IPSP cooperates it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes of work per quarter.
I've done it for a couple of years and as long as your IPSP cooperates it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes of work per quarter.
That might be true if you're lucky enough to have a single third-party payment service that collects all of your revenues including administering the VAT parts for you. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why that might not be the case or even possible. Even if you do use one of those services, it can't magically cope with all the edge cases any more than you or I can, and of course they tend to take an extra cut out of your revenue.
For everyone who needs to manage their taxes a bit closer to home, it takes longer than your suggested time just to check the rates regularly in case some member state decided to increase them with about a week's notice again. There's not really any good answer to VAT MOSS, there are just more inconvenient and/or expensive and slightly less inconvenient and/or expensive.
We've had some emails from them as well, but we still assume it's our responsibility to check the rates weekly, based on the fact that at least one rate change has come into effect with little more notice than that and nobody (including HMRC) actively notified us first.
Publishing the rates is certainly better than not publishing them, but unless that information is updated in close to real time so it picks up those short-notice changes and unless it's supplied in a machine-readable format so that you can use it as a basis for automatically calculating correct VAT at the time of sale, it's of limited value for anything other than spotting mistakes retrospectively.
