Andrew Needham looks at the VAT consequences of buying and selling goods located overseas.
The basic rule for considering the place of supply of goods is that they are supplied where they are physically located when they are sold or allocated to the customer.
In the simplest scenario, goods that are located in the UK at the time they are supplied to a customer are treated as supplied in the UK and subject to UK VAT. If the goods are exported from the UK, they can be zero-rated but the supplier must fulfil certain criteria in terms of obtaining and retaining export evidence, etc.
Goods that never come to the UK
It is quite common for a business to buy goods from an overseas supplier and have them delivered directly to a customer that is also overseas.
