Tens of thousands of sellers are in trouble again over VAT, and the mastermind behind this is actually...

There is a hot topic in the cross-border circle today, and Poland's VAT is in turmoil.

Poland VAT crash

Party M released the details of what happened:

In summary, party M opened the accounting firm Kiesa in Poland in 2015, and cooperated with EU** to become the Polish VAT agent in 2020, and only served this service provider to help its merchants with tax declarations.

The reason is that 100% of the VAT of Allegro's Polish cross-border e-commerce sellers will be audited. In 2023, the tax bureau found that 6 Chinese merchants had evaded taxes from 2021 to 2022, with a total amount of 2.27 million PLN (about 4.07 million RMB). After the Polish tax bureau discovered this, it sent letters to the merchant's registered address to contact the other party to pay the tax. More than 30 letters were mailed, but no reply was received in the end.

In mid-June this year, more than a dozen people from the tax bureau found the party M, who wanted to discuss with him whether a tax payment plan could be made. M was unable to contact the merchant and could only contact the domestic VAT intermediary Ou**. At the request of the tax bureau staff, M contacted Ou** in person by phone. The other party said that he would take responsibility and report to the company to discuss the plan.

But a few days later, the deputy director of the tax bureau called M and said that Ou** could not be contacted, and M was unable to contact Ou**.

Therefore, the Polish Tax Bureau has now blacklisted EU tax service providers and started to cancel VAT Polish tax numbers registered through EU tax. It is reported that hundreds of tax numbers have been shut down.

All VAT in Europe will be affected

According to M, EU tax information is shared. If merchant A engages in tax evasion in Poland, the Polish tax system will mark and blacklist the merchant, and these will be synchronized to other EU countries. They will use the Chinese credit number to audit the merchant's tax situation in their own country.

If there is a problem with VAT in one European country, it will lead to the risk of VAT being checked in all of Europe. It is not just a tax problem in Poland, but countless businesses will be affected. The Polish tax office only gives everyone 7 days, and if it is confirmed, it will cause a major VAT earthquake in Europe.

Many sellers think that if their VAT is being investigated, they can just change service providers. But the key issue is whether the merchant has paid the tax, but the money has not been paid to the tax bureau. Previously, a seller paid the full amount of tax to the service provider, but the money received by the tax bureau did not match what he paid. As a result, the merchant had to pay more than 1.5 million in taxes and late fees!

When we asked the service provider to resolve the problem, they said that there was a problem with the accounting firm they cooperated with and refused to take responsibility. They blamed each other and in the end the seller had to bear the loss.

We sellers usually go directly to tax service providers, which we often call "first tax agents", to help pay taxes. The first tax agent will hand over the tax payment to European accountants, and these accountants and tax agents have a cooperative relationship. However, there are also first tax agents who will find other service providers, called "second tax agents", and then the second tax agents will contact those accountants. In this way, there are many more links in the middle, and multiple middlemen appear.

Once risks are encountered, the innocent sellers are always the ones who get hurt in the end. After the problem broke out, we tried to trace the source, but found that the chain of responsibility was complicated and everyone was shirking responsibility, as if it was an endless game of passing the buck.

It is unknown who will eventually receive the tax paid by the sellers. The promise that "Chinese people do not cheat Chinese people" seems to have become an empty promise in this industry, because we find that sometimes the people who hurt us the most are our compatriots.

As the matter escalated, the relevant companies also issued statements.

Let’s wait and see what the truth of the incident is.

The service provider industry is very mixed and the water is very deep. With the booming cross-border business, more and more people want to get a piece of the pie, resulting in all kinds of people, and it is difficult to distinguish. Various promotional packages are flying everywhere, and sometimes, you may not be able to buy a reliable service even if you spend a lot of money.

It is still unclear who is right and who is wrong in today's incident, but I believe that sellers in Poland are already on pins and needles and discussing it everywhere. After all, the peak season is only a few months away, and if you are not careful, all your efforts this year will be wasted.