On September 10th the European Commission published its annual VAT gap report. The report shows that the European Union Member States lost a total of €140 billion in VAT in 2018. Even more worrisome is the forecast that those same Member States will lose a total of €164 billion in VAT over 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily there is also positive news as Commissioner Gentiloni is planning to ‘step up the fight against VAT fraud’.

In our last post, we discussed why we built a new PGP key generation. In today’s article, we’ll share a step-by-step guide on how to generate, use and store the PGP keys in a manner which is as secure and resilient as possible. This guide is inspired by the Glacier Protocol [1], which offers an extensive guideline on how to generate Bitcoin keys from your own source of entropy. The cryptocurrency community developed a suite of technologies and ideas to improve handling cryptographic keys.

summitto released an open source software library and utility: https://github.com/summitto/pgp-packet-library https://github.com/summitto/pgp-key-generation These allow anyone to easily generate secure PGP keys with excellent support to backup your keys. In this article, we provide a brief but dense explanation of why we chose to build this. In the next post we will explain to you in depth how to use it. Pretty Good Privacy PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy.

In the ninth episode of VAT Talks, we discuss VAT with Christiaan van der Valk. We are very happy that Christiaan showed us the other side of tax law, the company side. Christiaan Van Der Valk is vice president, strategy. Elected a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow in 2000, Christiaan is an internationally recognized voice on e-business strategy, law, policy, best practice and commercial issues. Formerly co-founder and president of Trustweaver (acquired by Sovos), Christiaan also holds long-standing leadership roles at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the European E-invoicing Service Providers Association (EESPA).

In this episode of VAT Talks we discuss how Croatia combats tax fraud and how technology can help to detect this fraud with Dame of Honour Ksenija Cipek. Ksenija is Head for Tax Risk Analysis at the Ministry of Finance, Tax Administration, Republic of Croatia, Member of the OECD Group Harmful Tax Practices, Lecturer at the faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb, Member of the Government Blockchain Association (GBA) and member of the Blockchain Chamber of Commerce (US).

We care deeply about user privacy and anonymity on the web. Privacy by design is one of the things in our DNA, and we’re happy to say that our website is now live on the Tor network as part of the Tor Projects #MoreOnionsPorfavor campaign! The Tor Project develops privacy enhancing technologies to protect and advance human rights. We share the same values and you can see this also in our solution and approach to fight VAT fraud.

For this episode of VAT Talks we had the honour to speak with Marie Lamensch. Marie Lamensch is Professor of Taxation at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) and the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a lawyer at the Brussels Bar. She is a member of the VAT expert group of the EC and academic adviser for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Customs Organisation.

In this episode of VAT Talks we discuss VAT with Madeleine Merkx. Madeleine is Partner at the tax research center of BDO and Professor of Indirect Taxes at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Learn why Madeleine fell in love with VAT at first sight, what she thinks about (real-time) invoice reporting and why tax experts and technology experts should exchange knowledge more often. For how long have you been working in VAT and how did you end up in this field of work?

In this episode of VAT Talks we’ll be looking at the practical side of VAT with Marinus Peters, partner at INSynQ. Marinus has many years of experience in assisting companies with the implementation of SAP systems and enables them to improve their business processes. Learn more about SAP, why Marinus believes that more countries will introduce an invoice reporting system and why the European Union should prioritise the harmonisation of VAT legislation.

Previously, we explained why our blockchain based real-time invoice reporting system can be easily scaled to almost the entire EU and why it does not require more energy than any other invoice reporting system. In this blog post, we’ll explain why summitto’s invoice reporting system is different from a ‘regular’ invoice reporting system. One of the most important reasons is that our system guarantees the confidentiality of the taxpayer. That’s why we also refer to TX++ as a confidential real-time invoice reporting system.