I see in several news stories today that Joe Hockey and the various state/territory treasurers have now agreed on the implementation of the GST on overseas purchases of less than $1000 AUD. The collection and compliance is clearly a problem (in the too hard basket locally) and it seems that they are counting on overseas suppliers registering for the Australian GST through the existing GST registration process. Hockey said that ATO officers would be visiting overseas suppliers like Amazon to inform them of the requirement and get them signed up for the GST. The problem for the Feds is that they have no compliance mechanism for those that do not register for the GST and no ability to force them to do so. Hockey admits that trying to police it via Australia Post, Customs, etc would be incredibly labour intensive and costly, thus they want the overseas retailers to 'sign up' as GST collectors and remit the funds to the ATO - good luck with that. He might be well advised to get the ATO to talk to the Euro VAT people about how they force compliance.
What is the incentive for small astro retailers, who do some business with Australians for things like EPs, adaptors, and other sub-$1000 AUD purchases, to voluntarily enrole as GST collectors? The ATO can't possibly identify and visit all of them, and then there it is strictly voluntary as to whether they register for GST. Perhaps if the US Internal Revenue Service advises all of the registered businesses in the US that this is now a requirement they might get somewhere. However, in Australia, retailers are not required to register for the GST unless they turnover +$75000 pa. How many overseas retailers are doing that sort of volume and even know if they do. I believe that there will be gapping holes in this collection regime. Sure it's probably easy to get Amazon to comply, but little guys like Unihedron, Kendricks, maybe Agena Astro, what's the stick that is going to push this compliance work onto them?
Also, it's appears settled that it will be a July 2017 start, so people will be burning the internet up prior to that with purchases.
