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VATupdate Newsletter Week 14 2025

BOUNDARIES

This weekend, I was cycling through the forest, close to where I live, and I noticed the sunlight beaming through the leaves. In some forests, if you look up, you’ll see something curious: the treetops of certain species never quite touch. It turns out it’s called crown shyness—a little dance of the leaves, never touching each other, creating a puzzle-piece-like pattern in the forest canopy. It’s kind of like social distancing for trees.

Now, zoom out from the forest and into the world of online dating. There too, boundaries reign. You craft a profile, toss in a few quirks, a favourite song, maybe a filtered vacation photo. But then comes the tricky bit: how much do you reveal? When does “I love cats, cycling and beer” become “I cry every time I see a Subaru advertisement”?

Oversharing, like overlapping crowns, can cloud things.

And speaking of cloudy strategies—remember the import tariffs the Trump administration championed? The idea was simple: draw lines. Raise borders. Make it expensive to bring goods in, and maybe people will turn to home-grown options. But this kind of boundary-making has side effects: retaliatory tariffs, higher prices, disrupted supply chains. What was meant to encourage may well end up isolating.

So where’s VAT in all this?

First of all, it’s not recommended to mention that you like VAT in your online dating profile. You’ll have many people swiping the wrong way. But VAT is, in many ways, also the great arbiter of boundaries. The VAT rules apply to specific situations, so you have to know the facts: Who’s the supplier? Where’s the customer? What’s the nature of the good or service?

Only then does the right tax treatment reveal itself—like a well-behaved tree staying in its lane. Cross a border? The rules shift. Stay within your zone? Different story. VAT thrives on distinctions—domestic vs. cross-border, B2B vs. B2C, taxable vs. exempt.

But, like crown shyness, like dating, like international trade—it’s not just about drawing lines. It’s about why we draw them. Is it to protect? To clarify? To connect better? Too much rigidity, and the system buckles. Too little, and it blurs into chaos. Whether you’re a tree, a singleton, or a customs officer—boundaries matter. But so does the wisdom to know when they help, and when they just get in the way.

We can’t help you finding the perfect date. But if you ever want to go cycling through the forest or the Dutch mountains (i.e. the dunes), let us know. And for the latest VAT news, just visit our website www.vatupdate.com every day.

If you have any comments, questions, or ideas that you want to share with us, please send us an email at [email protected] or leave a comment under the posts of this newsletter on LinkedIn.


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