Tax on shipping still counts

The EU VAT Assistant doesn’t calculate, nor deduct VAT from the prices. When a valid VAT number is entered, the plugin tells WooCommerce that the customer should be exempt from tax, then WooCommerce (and, possibly, other plugins), do what they need with that information.

In normal circumstances, the result is that the whole order is made exempt of VAT, not just products. If the shipping still shows tax, then it means that “something” is applying the tax to that element. For example:
1. A shipping plugin, which fetches costs and taxes from a remote service, ignoring the exemption.
2. Another plugin (not necessarily for shipping) that adds taxes to the shipping cost.
3. Some custom code in the theme.
4. some automated tax calculation service that ignores the exemption and applies taxes anyway.

The first step would be to identify such element. A simple approach is to go by exclusion, disabling other plugins one by one and switching to a basic theme to exclude custom code. That helps narrowing down the list of possible causes, making it easier to identify the source of the “extra” VAT on shipping.

If you got a support plan for the EU VAT Assistant, we can also investigate the issue for you (such service is not available as part of the free support provided via this forum). In such case, you can contact us via our contact form, at https://aelia.co/contact, and we will send you further instructions.

Thank you for the fast reply.

We only use a shipping plugin of the national shipping provider.
That self adds no tax; it’s the setting in WooCommerce.

So, it must be WooCommerce itself that doesn’t apply the VAT deduction well.
I’ll contact them for more info.

Thanks!

I don’t think that WooCommerce doesn’t apply the deduction. In all our tests, we noticed that the logic is simple: if the customer is set as exempt, taxes are not added at all, either to products or to shipping.

In technical terms, the exemption is applied by calling wc()->customer->set_is_vat_exempt(true);. That’s what makes WooCommerce skip the tax calculations.

I still believe that the cause is to be found elsewhere. If we were to investigate it ourselves, we would start by going by exclusion, disabling other plugins and the themes, to see if any of them could be causing the error.

For shipping, you could try using a built-in shipping method, such as Flat Rate. Those methods are also exempt from taxes when the exemption is applied. If you see that the products and the flat rate shipping are tax exempt when all other plugins and the existing themes are disabled, then you will have the confirmation that one of those elements is contributing to the issue.

Yes, thank you for the clear explanation!
Then it’s probably the plugin of the national shipping provider.

That could be possible. Perhaps the national shipping provider returns costs inclusive of tax, or a “tax” element, and the code used to interact with it just adds the tax to the order, ignoring the possible presence of an exemption.

If that’s the case, it might be possible to fix the “interface” plugin to skip the tax element when needed. Of course, this depends on how that plugin works.