August 28, 2007
Europe’s Biggest Scam – Tax Free Cash Refund
Having just got back from Europe, we’ve got to admit that the biggest cons we noticed across the three countries we traversed was the EU’s Tax Free Cash Refund scheme – the system that suggests to out of EU shoppers that they can get your sales tax back when you leave the region. By looking at the crafty promotion of the service to entice visitors into stores and the huge effort to make collection of paid taxes as difficult as possible, we can only conclude that this must be just one big scam.
Here’s our example – as we left Paris for Milan, when we found the tax office identified only by a paper-sign in the arrivals (?!) section of Charles De Gaul, we were told we’d have to collect our taxes in Milan as we weren’t yet leaving the EU. When we left Milan for Newark, at the second tax office (the first was hidden in the corner of the airport and was unable to help us because we hadn’t crossed security… which made us wonder why it was there) we were told that we couldn’t collect the tax from the purchase in Paris because the store didn’t exist in Italy and that we had to send a letter to the store to help us get the tax back. What?
For a moment we thought that this was a EU backed project but now we looked into it as we wrote this post, it turns out that its a private company providing this.
We wonder how many poor sods in the line in the photo got mucked around like us. All of them?
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