VATupdate Newsletter Week 32 2026

SHOES

As it is vacation time, we don’t have any nostalgic, scientific, or technical remarks for you this week. Instead, we hope you are all enjoying the summer with your partner, children, family and friends.

But if you happen to be driving to your holiday destination, you may have noticed something rather strange along the way.

A shoe. Usually just one. Lying abandoned on the side of the road.

And you may have wondered: Who’s shoe is that? More importantly: where is the other one?

I have seen quite a few of them over the years. And somehow, they remind me of one of the first news items I ever wrote for the VAT newsletter of a Big Four firm, approximately 25 years ago.

Back then, researching tax news was a rather different exercise. We didn’t simply go to VATupdate.com, we went to the library and collected news from magazines, periodicals and newspapers, supplemented by the first online databases that were slowly becoming available.

One day, while going through the EU Official Journal, I came across a question from the European Parliament about shoes. Not really VAT-related. But intriguing, nevertheless.

The question concerned shoes that had washed ashore on European beaches. Apparently, a survey had shown that in some of the southern Member States, more left shoes were washing ashore, while in northern Member States more right shoes were being found. Or perhaps it was the other way around. After 25 years, I have to admit that particular detail has been lost somewhere between my memory and the North Sea.

The interesting part was the proposed solution. Could there be some kind of exchange programme to reunite the left shoes found in one part of Europe with the right shoes found somewhere else?

Crazy, right? But with the benefit of hindsight, however, perhaps the question was not quite as ridiculous as it first appeared.

Because if we look at the history of shoes, the problem of matching left and right shoes would not even have existed for most of human history.

For centuries, shoes were essentially identical. There was no specific left shoe and right shoe. You could put either shoe on either foot. It was only much later that shoemakers began producing shoes specifically shaped for the left and right foot. And once that happened, shoes became more comfortable – but also much less interchangeable. In other words, standardisation brought us comfort, but it also created a compatibility problem.

And that, strangely enough, sounds rather familiar to anyone working in VAT.

The European Union has spent decades trying to harmonise VAT rules across Member States. The objective is clear: create a common system so that businesses operating across borders can understand the rules and, ideally, apply them consistently.

But harmonisation has a funny habit of producing the opposite problem.

We start with one European VAT system. Then we introduce national legislation. Then national interpretations. Then administrative guidance. Then exceptions. Then exceptions to the exceptions.

And before you know it, we have 27 different versions of what was originally supposed to be a common pair of shoes.

The shoes may look similar. They may even have been made according to the same European design. But try putting the Dutch shoe on the German foot and you may discover that the fit is not quite as comfortable as expected.

Perhaps that is why EU VAT has always been a little like a shoe shop. And perhaps that old parliamentary question about shoes contains an important lesson: Sometimes, what looks like a completely pointless question makes perfect sense once you understand the problem behind it.

That is also true for VAT.

And now, if you are driving to your holiday destination, keep an eye out for those lonely shoes. There may be a VAT story hiding in the other one.

Have a great summer, enjoy your holidays, and (most importantly) make sure you return with both shoes.

Anyone interested in more VAT news, developments and occasional philosophical reflections on the strange similarities between tax law and everyday life can subscribe to the weekly VATupdate newsletter at VATupdate.com

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.

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