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France to end non-essential printing of paper receipts
(www.euronews.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Because there are side-effects. Receipts are an important tool against tax evasion. I.e. I would be very surprised if this change doesn't cost magnitudes more in lost revenue than in prevented environmental damage. If the benefits are small even a small cost can make your measure a bad idea.
Edit: Not exactly scientific but: I can find thermal paper that can be recycled as paper for about €0.07 per meter on amazon.de. I.e. a single environmentally friendly receipt costs about a cent. As a reference: Tax evasion in this area is around 10 billion euros per year in Germany alone.
Customer can still get a receipt, it just won't always be printed, you'll have to ask. So this wont change anything related to tax evasion, it just means that you won't have a garbage can full of newly printed receipt next to the exit door
Asking defeats the purpose.
The point is that receipts make it extremely easy for IRS agents/tax officers to check whether a till actually registers all sales. They just need to make a few purchases and then later check whether what’s on their receipt matches the till’s memory. But it doesn’t work if they have to ask for a receipt. A portion of turnover will be declared anyway and it’s going to be that with receipts if those are optional.
Sure, a tax dodger might end up going through the garbage to remove the transactions corresponding to receipts that were thrown away from their records, but that's at least quite a bit of effort.
The point is that an IRS agent wouldn't throw the receipt in the garbage. I.e. the garbage would be the easiest way to determine which receipts might end up being used as a reference by the authorities.
I know people who work in the tax office. Mandatory receipts being necessary is an undisputed fact for them.
You are talking from a pure economic and profit viewpoint. The nature doesn't care about your profits. It cares about your actions. Nature is literally burning right now and we need action to prevent that and yes that does come with a price. Stop thinking only in profits. Also your argument about the "cheap price" does not hold up. We use billions of meters of recipes every year. Let's say the average frensh person go shopping 3 times a week and thereby use about 0.5m of receipt there are 67 milion people in France but let's say some are kids and some don't go shopping so let's make that an even 50milion people.
50 milion people using 0.5m of paper for 50 weeks that's 1.25 bilion meters of paper for 0.07€ that's 87.5 million euros spend on just the paper alone then there's the cost of all the machines and man hours spend on servicing them etc etc. and that's just France!
So come again.
Edit: yes you say tax evasion is higher, but I highly doubt moving from a paper recipt to a digital one or none at all will change that significantly
Exactly. It costs money. Money we won't have when let people dodge taxes. 87.5 million isn't much when we're talking about costs in the double digit billions.
Do you really believe the government would implement something this unpopular unless it worked? If they do something like that, it's abundantly clear that it's necessary. No one starts annoying people with that flimsy paper for ideological reasons.
If you know a little bit about sales tax evasion, it becomes abundantly clear that receipts help. To explain: If you dodge taxes and don't want to get caught you'll still declare a portion of your turnover to not arise suspicion. Hence it doesn't matter if half the people in question get a digital receipt, half (or so) will be declared by tax dodgers as well. Receipts make it extremely easy for IRS agents/tax officers to check whether a till actually registers all sales. They just need to make a few purchases and then later check whether what's on their receipt matches the till's memory. But it doesn't work if they have to ask for a receipt. As I said, a portion of turnover will be declared anyway and it's going to be that with receipts if those are optional.
Hence best we can do is to allow digital as an alternative to printing so that not all receipts are printed. That's possible here in Germany, but it's not used much and it's an either or relation to paper printing. If you have a feasible solution on how to force everyone (including octogenarians with dementia) to receive a digital receipt, I'm all ears. But if you don't then paper is the best we've got. It's also the only solution that's privacy friendly.