Exporting to Germany - recommend an Indirect Representative?

[Aquarius909]

We are thinking of sending stock to Amazon Germany (we have a Germany VAT registration) but are being told we need an Indirect Representative to process the inbound VAT payments.

Can anyone recommend someone to do this please? I thought a courier might do this for us but so far the ones we use have said they don't do this.

[skwdenyer]

Aquarius909 said:

We are thinking of sending stock to Amazon Germany (we have a Germany VAT registration) but are being told we need an Indirect Representative to process the inbound VAT payments.

Can anyone recommend someone to do this please? I thought a courier might do this for us but so far the ones we use have said they don't do this.

The basic problem is that, despite your German VAT registration, as a non-German company they don't want you as the debtor of the German customs authorities.

If you have a German VAT registration, do you not already have a VAT agent? That would usually be required. If so, I would ask them.

If you do not have a German VAT agent (perhaps because your registration pre-dates Brexit, so it was not deemed necessary as a company from an EU member state) then you're probably going to need one in any case.

The Indirect Representative is going to become jointly liable for the VAT debt in most cases, so this won't usually be something the couriers can handle.

It used to be somewhat possible to do this via DDP terms through couriers, but "common practice" doesn't align with German tax law. This page gives a bit of additional context: https://scheller-international.com/blog-beitraege/...

Unfortunately, Germany doesn't have postponed import VAT accounting unlike, say, the Netherlands.

There are also potentially problems with import VAT being non-reclaimable in Germany (some people recommend importing via another EU country to avoid this). This is quite a good summary: https://www.corintax.com/vat-refund-for-ddp-shipme...

I'd suggest a start would be to speak to Avalara and see if any of their services are appropriate to your needs. They're a touch corporate, but they do seem to know their onions. https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-services/fi...

For full disclosure, I have spoken with them, and formed a view as to their general value, but I haven't instructed them, as I solved our EU problems through the Netherlands and was able to get local providers by recommendation.

Good luck. Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving