Elektroninės komercijos apmokestinimas pridėtinės vertės mokesčiu
VALUE ADDED TAX IN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

Summary/Abstract: Electronic space is steadily gaining popularity as an attractive environment for business organisation. Electronic dispatch of goods in a digital form allowing to avoid traditional checking procedure, increased level of anonymity of operations carried out within internet, introduction of electronic currency, and considerable mobility of electronic commerce account for the governmental institutions’ concern about effective application of tax rates that have existed up until now. Special attention is given to the value added tax (VAT) as its regulation by current legislation has become largely ineffective in terms of newly-introduced business models. Criticism of VAT for its poor effectivity in the area of electronic commerce was based, to a degree, on the circumstance that identification of the second party of a deed, that is the buyer, was impossible. Most authors argue that information technologies allow to identify only the IP of a computer system, not a subject who used it. The main objective of this article is to analyse the dilemma of e-commerce and value added tax (VAT) compatibility. A search for effective ways of imposing a VAT tax on electronic commerce lasted in the European Union up till 2000. In 2002, the adoption of the Sixth Directive “On Value Added Tax” consolidated a new pattern applied to the taxation of services rendered exclusively in an electronic way. Requirements of this Directive are in force also in the Republic of Lithuania since May 200 . High demands are raised to the e-commerce sellers, therefore the focus is set on inadequateness between obligations which are definite in legal norms and opportunities which e-commerce provides. Even the new changes applying VAT does not wholly balance the relationship between tax institutions and e-commerce sellers. The new scheme is a first step to the ef ficient application of traditional VAT to the new form of commerce.

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