TF2O
scenario Tax Free Shopping
Article 38-quater of DPR 633/1972 provides that, for consumer goods purchased in Italy, sales to extra-EU travellers in transit are not taxable for VAT. This particular purchase method, named Tax Free Shopping, allows to buy goods for personal use, obtaining VAT refund.
Electronic Invoicing
Starting from 1st September 2018, invoices related to this type of purchases must be issued only in electronic mode. The main goal of the introduction of electronic invoice in Tax Free Shopping is the necessity to guarantee interoperability between the electronic invoice system and O.T.E.L.L.O. (Online Tax Refund at Exit: Light Lane Optimization), a system introduced by “Agenzia dei Monopoli e delle Dogane” that is interconnected to customhouses.
Union Refund Srl, a Florentine company, provides its customers residing outside the European Community VAT exemption assistance services (VAT-OFF) on goods purchased from Italian partners. Union Refund Srl hired Bridge Consulting to create a layer of integration that allows to:
- simplify the dialogue between the existing invoicing system (TOTFREE) and OTELLO, minimizing the impacts on the existing invoicing solution
- observe all the directives established by “Agenzia dei Monopoli e delle Dogane” in dialogue process with OTELLO, in a transparent way for the TOTFREE application.
SolutionsFull integration
Bridge Consulting s.r.l. developed a set of APIs (Web Services SOAP) in order to transmit to OTELLO the data of Tax Free Invoices (FTF), notes of VAT variation or previously sent credit notes related to FTF; verify the affixing of the digital customs visa; communicate the affixing of a visa in another Member State of the European Community.
Since the fiscal documents sent to OTELLO must be firstly electronically signed by the company that issued them, the solution, provided by Bridge Consulting, interacts with an automatic remote signature system supplied by the third-party partner, a Certification Authority that issues qualified certificates.
Bridge Consulting deployed the software solution on Amazon AWS platform based on two EC2 instances (called TF2O and SWS appliance) and a RDS MySQL database:
- TF20 - Web Services for Legacy applications that may be invoked by the Union Refund TOTFREE platform to to manage the FTF life cycle.
- SWS Virtual Applicance to contact remote HWS hosts of the Certification Authority to request the remote automatic signature by the assignor (in XadES format) of documents, received from TF20.
The TF20 instance relies on a RDS MySQL database for personal data of store vendors that collaborate with Union Refund and uses a secure S3 bucket to store authentication certificates of “Dogane” system.
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