The 2015 EU rule moved digital VAT to the customer's country

The workload

Before 2015, a seller of telecommunications, broadcasting or electronic services inside the EU generally charged VAT based on where the seller was established, not where the customer lived. Verified: the European Commission's own guidance, preserved in a 2016 archived capture of its digital-services page because the live version has since been retired, states that from 1 January 2015 such services are always taxed in the country where the customer belongs, regardless of whether the supplier sits inside or outside the EU. The workload that created was new: a seller had to identify each customer's country and either register there directly or use a single registration covering them all.

What the documents show

Verified: the same archived guidance states the one-time registration scheme, the Mini One Stop Shop, was in 2015 extended to telecommunications and broadcasting and made available to EU businesses too — MOSS itself predated 2015 in narrower form, and 2015 broadened who could use it and which services it covered, rather than inventing registration simplification from nothing. Verified: the Commission's current OSS registration guidance, retrieved 16 September 2026, confirms a business already registered in MOSS's Union or non-Union scheme before 1 July 2021 continues under that same scheme rather than needing a fresh registration. The 2015 rule and the 2021 OSS are not one scheme: 2015 set the customer-location tax rule and the narrower MOSS filing mechanism; 2021 replaced MOSS with a broader OSS that also covers goods.

The operating cost

The archived guidance names no registration fee, and the tax rate itself was, and remains, whatever the customer's own country charges — its own summary table shows a domestic sale, a cross-border EU sale and a non-EU sale each taxed differently under the same transaction type. The real 2015 cost to a solo founder was administrative: establishing customer location under the Commission's own evidentiary standard, which called for at least two non-contradictory pieces of evidence, such as billing address and payment-method country, before applying that country's rate.

The stop condition

The Commission's own text supplies the stop condition indirectly: the 2015 rule's MOSS filing mechanism stopped being the current one on 1 July 2021, when OSS absorbed it. A source that still describes MOSS as the current EU-wide scheme for digital services is describing a mechanism the Commission's own registration guidance says has since been superseded.

• Does a given source describe MOSS or OSS, and does that match the 1 July 2021 changeover the Commission's own pages state?
• Is customer location being established with at least two consistent, non-contradictory pieces of evidence, as the 2015-era guidance required?
• Has a legacy MOSS registration been carried over and updated for OSS rather than left as it stood before 2021?

The 2015 rule fixed where digital VAT is owed; the filing mechanism for reporting it has since been renamed and widened, but the underlying customer-location principle has not moved.