Great article/rant, I could not agree more – there are no simple technical solutions!

Today I had the first case of “VAT fraud” where a German customer was pretending to come from the US so that my checkout system does not charge him the ~7 Euro VAT.
While I could improve my system to rely stronger on the location proof before doing the checkout I am certainly not interested in building barriers to hold back my customers from buying.
So I end up paying the VAT out of my own pocket so that everything is with the German tax authorities. Fantastic!