Taxation | Change to the online alcohol store: the buyer is also responsible for paying excise taxes

From online stores the tax policy for purchased alcohol will change at the beginning of next month. After the change, the buyer is also responsible for paying alcohol excise duties.

Until now, the responsibility for paying excise duties has been with the seller or his representative, if the seller has somehow affected the transport. It has been considered sufficient for this, for example, that the seller’s website has a link to the website of a transport company. Taxes have been the buyer’s responsibility when the buyer has organized the transport completely independently.

After the beginning of September, the buyer together with the seller is responsible for paying the excise taxes if the seller has not made a prior notification and paid a bond to pay the excise taxes.

“When buying, the consumer cannot really know whether the seller will fulfill his obligations. If they are neglected, then the buyer is also responsible”, admits the leading tax expert of the Tax Administration Maid Lax.

The Tax Administration has previously estimated that the vast majority of shops selling alcohol online do not pay excise duty to Finland.

In the middleif not almost the only, reason for ordering alcohol online is the cheap prices of online stores. However, Lax gets too excited about them.

“If the online retailer’s price is significantly lower than the price including taxes, then of course it can be concluded” that the taxes will not be paid from that price.

The effect of excise duties on the price is not insignificant. In its announcement, the Tax Administration uses an example where 24 cans of 4.6% beer are ordered from a foreign online store for 13.90 euros. When you add to this the alcohol tax and the beverage packaging tax, which are part of the excise taxes, the taxable price of the beer shelf becomes more than twice as much, 31.08 euros.

In addition to paying the taxes, the online seller must give the transport company responsible for transporting the products an identifier obtained from the Tax Administration, which must be presented when requested during transport.

“The purpose of the identifier is to make it easier to identify shipments for which the taxes have been properly paid,” says Lax.

Lax believes that the new regulations will affect ordering alcohol online.

“When the buyer becomes liable for tax in all situations, it will certainly reduce orders. I would consider carefully whether I would order. So far I haven’t ordered.”

In June the approved law change is naturally motivated by money. The Ministry of Finance has estimated that the change will bring about five million euros more tax revenue to the state coffers.

Finns became excited to order alcohol online during the corona pandemic. After that, Customs and the Tax Administration also woke up to online shopping for throat lozenges, which started effective monitoring the following year.

During the inspection, the Customs found thousands of orders from foreign online stores whose excise duties had not been paid. The payment involved more than a million worth of excise taxes, some of which, however, the Customs had to return later due to ambiguities in interpretation.

Power monitoring ended at the end of last year. Deputy Director of the Tax Administration Tarja Valsi reminds, however, that even though the campaign is over, monitoring continues.

“The monitoring will definitely continue. In general, the Tax Administration has invested specifically in excise taxation in the control of the gray economy. The fact that the power monitoring project ended does not mean that there is no monitoring,” Valsi emphasizes.

Whether power monitoring is in progress or not, according to Valsi, “all harmful phenomena are monitored all the time”.

“The legislator wants to curb abuses and get Finland the tax revenue it deserves. The waltz sums it up.”

In Sweden, a similar law on the buyer’s tax liability has been in force for more than ten years.