In their proposal, the Commission estimated that the cost of VAT lost annually to fraud to be €5 billion,[5] and noted that:"Suppliers have changed their business models to benefit from e-commerce and sell their products to consumers globally without the need for a physical retail presence.
However, this opportunity is also exploited by fraudulent businesses to gain an unfair market advantage by not fulfilling their VAT obligations.
"[6]A BBC report which was referred to by the EU Commission indicated that the UK alone was losing £1 billion a year to cross-border VAT fraud.
[7] In the impact assessment accompanying the Directive, the Commission estimated that they would receive reports on 8 billion payment transactions annually, and the resultant file would be around 10 terabytes of data for each calendar year.
Member State have until 31 December 2023 to transpose the Directive, and may choose to issue additional guidance to industry at the same time (for example, Irish Revenue Commissioners,[9] Netherlands Belastingdienst[10] and Germany's Federal Central Tax Office[11] have all chosen to do so).