VATupdate Newsletter Week 4 2026

CRUMBS

Here we are again with this week’s overview of the latest VAT news from around the world. You may be interested in the upcoming IVA Conference, which will reflect on 70 Years of VAT. Or the latest developments in South Africa, where the VAT rate increase will (quite helpfully for some) raise public officials’ salaries. And what about the Finnish Court’s decision that the supply prior to the export can be zero-rated? Perfectly logical to you and me, but apparently a landmark moment up north.

I sometimes feel that what we do as VAT specialists is sifting through the crumbs and leftovers of what happens inside a business. Not the events themselves, but the fragments they leave behind. We collect them, arrange them, and try to decide whether, in fact, a taxable transaction lurked somewhere in the room.

A bit like the team of archaeologists in Denmark who recently examined a 1,000-year-old latrine and found… breadcrumbs. Tiny, ancient, medieval breadcrumbs.

Somewhere, deep beneath a former Viking settlement, someone in the year 1026 took a bite of bread and unknowingly contributed to world heritage. From those crumbs alone, archaeologists reconstructed medieval trade routes, dietary habits, grain quality, and probably the social status of the poor soul who dropped them.

Small crumbs, big conclusions. VAT feels very much the same.

Because if archaeologists can map a millennium of commerce from the leftovers of a Viking lunch break, then VAT auditors can certainly reconstruct a taxable event from the faintest speck of evidence, sometimes even a speck the taxpayer didn’t know existed.

In VAT, the breadcrumbs are everywhere: invoices, emails, contracts, transport documents. Individually tiny. Collectively revealing. And the story they tell usually ends with the familiar conclusion: “Yes, that was a supply.”

Just like archaeologists, VAT specialists rarely start with the loaf. We start with traces: mismatched data, incomplete shipping docs, internal emails with suspiciously enthusiastic use of the phrase “pro forma invoice”. When pieced together, they reveal trade routes, flows of goods, cost allocations, the true nature of supplies, or that mysterious moment when a domestic transaction somehow dressed itself up as an intra-Community supply.

And, as in archaeology, the real challenge lies in interpretation. The crumbs don’t lie. But they also don’t speak. One archaeologist sees evidence of long-distance grain imports; another sees a Viking with poor table manners. In VAT, one expert sees a taxable supply; another a non-taxable cost recharge. Someone claims it’s a disbursement; someone else mutters, “No, it isn’t. Please stop calling everything a disbursement.”

Interpretation matters. The facts don’t change, but our understanding of them does. And that understanding can be the difference between a correct treatment and an unexpected assessment.

So next time you’re navigating a VAT review, remember: it’s not about finding the whole loaf. It’s about understanding the crumbs. Because every transaction (no matter how faint, small, or buried) can reveal a pattern.

And unlike the Vikings, we don’t need a thousand years to spot it.

It does make you wonder, though: what will future scientists discover in our keyboards?

If you have any comments, questions, or ideas that you want to share with us, please send us an email at [email protected] or leave a comment under the posts of this newsletter on LinkedIn.