The reverse charge method only applys if the customer is within the EU, but not in the same country as the shop.
Usually the majority of customers will be in the same country as the shop, and the VAT input form should be hidden for those users. Otherwise they might be tempted to input a false address to save the VAT payment :)
I manually deleted Germany from the array in the module code to get this behaviour, but it should be possible to do this automatically.

Thanks

Comments

wimh’s picture

wimh commented
Category: feature » support

You need to put the customer's VAT number on the invoice, even if he's in the same country, else he won't legally be allowed to ask for a refund of the VAT he paid to you. So in that case you also need the field, it's just not used to decide on whether to apply VAT.

Putting in a fake billing address is fraud. I think most shops prevent this by refusing to ship to the same country but billing outside the country.

ju.ri’s picture

ju.ri commented

Hmm.. that's interesting. Here in Germany you don't need the VAT number on every invoice, only for cross-border sales. On regular invoices you only need the address, date, and the tax amount as a seperate line item.
So maybe the VAT nr. input form could be optional.
In your country, do you really need the customers VAT number on every invoice? Even if you shop at, say, a department store, or amazon? Thats quite difficult to handle...