Every time differentiated VAT comes up, the same chorus predicts the apocalypse. Accountants drowning, shops seizing up, chaos erupting, the economy collapsing because, we’d apply more than one rate.

It’s nonsense

Multiple VAT rates are the global default. Germany, France, Sweden, nearly every country runs several rates at once and has for decades, on the same systems sold here. Nobody invented anything.

Because a VAT rate, in any real accounting or POS system, is just a field. A configurable value on a product or category. SAP, Dynamics, every cloud bookkeeping tool, every modern till ships with multi-rate support out of the box, because they’re built to be sold internationally, where multiple rates are normal. You assign a rate, the software does the math, splits the receipt, fills the return. This was solved years ago.

I wish this theatre of ignorance would stop. The only people who’d actually struggle are the ones running some homebrew, hard-coded “system” where the rate was baked into a formula by someone who left in 2014. That’s not an argument against tax policy. The software doesn’t care whether it’s 25% or 6%.