Do I need an EU VAT number with no company in Europe?
Possibly, and having no European company is not the deciding factor. Registration can arise from holding stock in a member state, from distance selling to consumers there, or from making digital supplies to them, and each of those routes works on what you do rather than on where you are incorporated. The place-of-supply rules are what reach a Canadian seller in the first place. So the question to start with is not corporate structure but activity: where your goods physically sit, who your customers are, and what you are actually supplying them. Those three answers decide whether anything is required, and by which route.
Does holding stock in an EU warehouse trigger VAT registration?
Stock is one of the routes to registration in its own right, so placing goods in a member state to shorten delivery times has to be treated as a tax decision and not only a logistics one. It also tends to sit awkwardly with the simplified schemes: a seller using a centralised reporting route for its consumer sales can still need a local registration in the state where the goods are held. Establish where stock will be held before it moves, and where it has already moved, get the arrival dates, because the registration question runs from when the goods got there.
Can I use a one stop scheme instead of registering in every country?
The one-stop schemes exist for exactly that: they centralise the reporting for qualifying sales, so you deal with one filing rather than one per member state. The part that catches sellers is the timing, because the scheme has to be opted into before the first sale it is meant to cover. It is not a way of tidying up sales already made. It also does not cover everything: stock held locally, and supplies outside the scheme scope, can still require registration in the member state concerned. Decide the route before you start selling, since the route also determines how input tax is recovered.
Which country VAT rate do I charge an EU consumer?
The place-of-supply rules decide it, and for consumer sales they generally look to where the customer is rather than where you are. That is what brings a Canadian seller into the system at all. In practice it means your pricing and your checkout have to be able to apply a different rate by destination, and your records have to evidence where the customer was, which is a data requirement as much as a tax one. For supplies to businesses the analysis differs, and the customer own registration number becomes part of the evidence. Establish which of your sales fall into which category first.
Can I reclaim the VAT I pay on my European costs?
Sometimes, and it depends on the registration route you chose. Recovering input tax is not a feature of every route: a centralised scheme designed to report tax due on consumer sales does not necessarily give you a mechanism for reclaiming tax you have been charged, whereas a local registration in the member state where the costs arise generally does. This is why the route decision should be made with both sides of the tax in view rather than on reporting burden alone. Where you already carry heavy local costs — storage, fulfilment, import charges — that recovery position may be the thing that decides the route.
I have been selling into Europe for years without registering, what now?
Handle the past and the future as two separate problems, because the simplified route is generally not available for the past: the schemes have to be opted into before the first sale they cover. So the forward position can often be arranged cleanly while the earlier period needs a different approach, usually in the member states the sales actually reached. The first task is evidence rather than filing. Where the customers were, what was supplied, whether stock was ever held locally, and when each of those started. The size and shape of the earlier period follows from that, and the route for dealing with it follows from the size.
How would a foreign tax authority know I am resident there?
Mostly from information you or your bank already provided. Account-opening forms ask you to self-certify tax residence, and that certification is reported between authorities under the Common Reporting Standard or, for US accounts, under the FATCA framework. Beyond that: employer and payroll filings, property registries, immigration records and the tax filings of anyone who paid you. The realistic planning assumption is that the data arrives. See FATCA and information reporting.
Is "fund transfer pricing" the same thing as transfer pricing?
No — and if you came here to calculate FTP, this is not it. Fund transfer pricing is a bank's internal allocation of funding costs and benefits between its own business units, a treasury and asset-liability management discipline used to measure branch or product profitability. Tax transfer pricing is about prices between legally separate related parties across borders, and about which country taxes the resulting profit. The words overlap; the fields do not. See our transfer pricing work.
