What changed
Mauritius: seven more VAT limbs out of one Finance Act
The Finance Act 2026 (Act No. 14 of 2026), gazetted 13 August, carries seven further amendments to the Value Added Tax Act beyond those already reported. One commenced on publication; the other six commence on 1 October 2026.
Postal services, and services supplied by a postal licence holder in connection with paying pensions and utility bills, move from exempt to zero-rated on 13 August: a new paragraph 1B in item 7 of the Fifth Schedule adds them, while section 25(r)(iv) repeals the First Schedule item 30(b) exemption that had covered the identical wording. The customer-facing rate does not move; attributable input tax becomes recoverable (record). From 1 October, section 5 gains a third time-of-supply trigger: VAT falls due three months after a supply is delivered or performed, whatever the invoice and payment dates. It arrives as paragraph (c) in subsections (1) and (2) but as sub-paragraph (iii) inside the lease limb of subsection (3), so it reaches leases and not hire-purchase supplies (record). Hotels and tourist residences that take more than half their payment in specified foreign currencies must file and pay half the VAT due in that currency (record). VAT deferred at importation but not declared as output tax in the right period costs MUR 10,000 and must be declared in the next period (record). Management-licence services to Global Business Licence corporations, and to trusts and foundations whose principals and majority beneficiaries are non-resident, become exempt under new First Schedule item 97 (record).
Two limbs are purely punitive. Failure to issue fiscal invoices now costs MUR 5,000 per day, capped at MUR 1,000,000 over any rolling twelve months (record). Section 20E makes it an offence to fail to use the e-invoicing system when required to; on conviction the maximum fine doubles from MUR 200,000 to MUR 500,000 and the maximum term of imprisonment doubles from twelve months to twenty-four (record).
What it means. This is the third consecutive reading of the same Act to produce new material. The pattern is worth naming: a finance act is not one change, and the limbs that surface last tend to be the procedural ones — time of supply, penalties, deferred import VAT — that never make a headline but do change what your system has to compute. If you have Mauritian operations, the 1 October cluster is a single release, not five tickets.
United Arab Emirates: input tax now depends on checking your supplier
FTA Decision No. 13 of 2026, issued 22 July and effective 1 October 2026, sets out what a taxable person must do to verify the validity and integrity of a supply before deducting input tax under Article 54 bis of the VAT Law. Verification covers the supplier’s identity — Emirates ID or certificate of incorporation — its address, and risk indicators such as address changes and volume anomalies. Where supplies from one supplier exceed AED 375,000 over twelve months, a written bank-account confirmation is required. The supply itself must be assessed for commercial plausibility, payment method and authenticity of goods. Consideration must be paid by electronic means, and every step must be documented and retained under a policy naming those responsible. A per-supply exception applies below AED 10,000 excluding VAT — but Article 6(2) switches it off entirely where supplies from that supplier exceed AED 100,000 over twelve months (record).
What it means. This moves the burden of proof. Input tax has always required a valid invoice; it now also requires evidence that you looked at who issued it. The AED 375,000 trigger is low enough to catch ordinary trading relationships, and the AED 10,000 relief is not the escape hatch it looks like: a buyer taking AED 3,000 of supplies monthly from one supplier crosses the AED 100,000 supplier cap inside a year and loses the exception on every one of them. An invoice-level test will implement this wrong. Six weeks is not long to build a supplier-screening step into a purchase-to-pay flow.
Madagascar: an amending finance law nobody was tracking
Loi n° 2026-004, the amending finance law for 2026, was promulgated on 16 July and makes seven changes to VAT in the Code des Impôts. Luxury rice moves from exempt to a new 5% reduced rate. Kerosene is retaxed at 20%. Electric hybrid vehicles are retaxed at 20% as the exemption is narrowed to pure electric vehicles. Interest charged by banks and financial institutions on customer financing becomes exempt, as do meat sales, fungicides, herbicides and mosquito-coil insecticides. The law enters into force on radio broadcast or posting, independently of Journal Officiel insertion (record).
What it means. This is the first Madagascar entry in this feed, and it exists because the sweep looked past the jurisdictions that usually generate news. Both directions of travel are present in one law — food and agriculture relieved, fuel and hybrids taxed — which is what a revenue-neutral rebalancing looks like in practice.
Botswana: a new VAT Act, and invoices must now be electronic
The Value Added Tax Act, 2026 (Act No. 15 of 2026), published in the Extraordinary Gazette on 1 July, repeals and replaces the previous Act. Section 59(8) requires every registered person to issue tax invoices electronically through the electronic billing system, and section 60(4) extends that to credit and debit notes (record). Schedule 4 prescribes what a tax invoice must show: the words “original tax invoice” in a prominent place, the name, address and VAT registration number of both parties, an individualised serial number and date, a description and quantity or volume, and the total VAT charged (record).
What it means. Both obligations have been live since 1 July, which makes this a compliance check rather than a project. The Schedule 4 particulars are the part that catches foreign suppliers out — an invoice that satisfies another country’s rules will not necessarily carry the prominent “original tax invoice” wording.
United States: Maryland’s digital advertising tax is struck down
On 14 August the Maryland Tax Court issued three separate orders the same day, in three separate dockets — Apple, Google and Peacock TV — holding Maryland’s Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax unlawful and unconstitutional and reversing the Comptroller’s refund denials, with refunds payable with interest. Apple and Google won on all counts; Peacock on all but the foreign Commerce Clause count, which the Comptroller won. There are three holdings: the tax violates the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act because digital advertising is indistinguishable from the non-digital advertising Maryland does not tax; it fails the Complete Auto tests of fair apportionment, non-discrimination and fair relation under the Dormant Commerce Clause; and it violates the Due Process Clause. In Peacock the court added a fourth, First Amendment holding against the news-media exemption (record).
What it means. Maryland’s tax was the first of its kind in the United States and has been the template other states cite. Every ground — the federal statute, the Commerce Clause, Due Process — attacks a feature any copy would share. The decision is at Tax Court level and the Comptroller may appeal, so nothing is final; but anyone who paid should be preserving refund claims now rather than after an appellate ruling.
South Africa: schools leave the VAT system
The Taxation Laws Amendment Act 5 of 2026, gazetted 1 April, inserted a new section 12(h)(iv) exempting any goods or services supplied by a school registered or provisionally registered under the South African Schools Act, with effect from 1 January 2026 — excluding supplies made in respect of welfare activities carried on by a welfare organisation, as confirmed in a section 41B ruling. The same section removed schools from the educational-services exemption, so a school’s entire output is now exempt rather than only its teaching. On 7 August SARS issued a media release calling on affected VAT-registered schools to apply to cancel their registrations (record).
What it means. The exemption has been in force for nearly eight months and the deregistration call is the first push to act on it. Exiting is not free: assets held are deemed supplied, measured at 31 December 2025, with the charge payable from 1 January 2027 in twelve monthly instalments. Schools running qualifying welfare activities are the exception — they may stay registered, but must apply for a ruling by 30 September 2026.
In short
- Croatia — Phase 2 of Fiskalizacija 2.0 starts 1 January 2027: taxpayers who during 2026 only receive e-invoices must from then also issue them, in structured XML. PDF, Word and Excel are not accepted. (record) Worth noting that “receive only” covers non-VAT-registered income-tax and profit-tax obligors and budget users, who tend not to think of themselves as in scope for anything.
- Kazakhstan — the reduced VAT rate on medicines, medical devices and assistive aids rises from 5% to 10% on 1 January 2027, under Article 503(2) of the new Tax Code. (record) A step-up written into the Code from the outset, not a new decision — which is exactly why it is easy to miss.
- Peru — SUNAT Resolution 000143-2026 defers Resolution 000048-2026 from 1 August 2026 to 1 January 2027, and pushes the airport-services and natural-gas electronic-issuer designations from 1 November 2026 to 1 April 2027. (record)
- Slovakia — the state eFaktúra infrastructure went live on 21 August, ahead of the mandatory regime, and full-value eFaktúry can now be exchanged through certified delivery service providers. (record) Voluntary now, which is the cheap window to test in.
- United Arab Emirates — FTA Decision No. 4 of 2026, effective 30 July, sets the rules for holding accounting records electronically: complete, identical to the originals, legible, and accessible to the Authority on request including passwords or encryption keys. (record)
- Cuba — Resolution 172/2026, in force 11 August, sets revised excise rates on vehicle sales in convertible currency, from 35% on luxury combustion and hybrid cars down to 3% on domestically assembled electric vehicles, with a 10% sales tax on parts and engines. (record)
- Chile — SII Resolution 99, of 27 July, lets taxpayers in ten disaster-declared regions issue paper tax documents instead of electronic DTEs for twelve months from 21 July 2026. (record) A reminder that mandatory e-invoicing regimes generally keep a paper escape hatch for exactly this.
- Malaysia — Service Tax Policy 5/2025 (Amendment No. 4) exempts newborns without citizenship status from service tax on private healthcare, where a parent is a citizen and documentation is produced at registration. (record)
- South Africa — Notice R. 7808 of 14 August narrows an exclusion in Schedule 1 item 412.09, which now reads simply “robbery or theft”, aligning the VAT item with the corresponding Customs and Excise rebate. (record)
- Czechia — the EET 2.0 bill passed its third reading in the Chamber of Deputies on 15 July, and on 19 August the Senate returned it with amendments. It is back with the Chamber, which may reconsider it from 4 September. It is not law. (record)
Themes
Four announced changes fall due within six weeks, and three of them have no instrument. Thailand’s reduced 7% VAT rate expires on 30 September; the Cabinet approved a draft Royal Decree in principle on 27 July, and the decree-number slot in its own press release is still blank. The United Kingdom announced zero-rating for domestic electricity from 1 October; no order has been laid, and HMRC’s published VAT-rates guidance still shows 5%. Barbados announced a registration-threshold rise from BBD 200,000 to 350,000 from 1 October; the revenue authority’s own threshold table still ends at 200,000 with no closing date. Against those, the UAE’s 1 October supplier-verification rules are signed, numbered and published — the exception rather than the pattern.
The Isle of Man has legislated the electricity change the United Kingdom has not. Two jurisdictions bound to the same VAT rate are now several weeks apart on the same measure, with the smaller one ahead.
Finance acts keep yielding on re-reading. Mauritius produced seven further VAT limbs at a third pass. Madagascar’s amending finance law carried seven at first reading, in a jurisdiction with no prior coverage here at all. In both cases the limbs that surfaced were procedural — time of supply, penalties, deferred import VAT, schedule particulars — rather than rate changes.
Two of this week’s changes tighten the conditions on deducting input tax rather than changing what is taxed. The UAE now requires documented supplier verification before deduction; Mauritius penalises deferred import VAT that is not declared in the right period and shortens nothing but the tolerance. Neither alters a rate.
E-invoicing news this week is about infrastructure and dates rather than new mandates. Slovakia’s state network went live, Croatia fixed the scope of its second phase, Peru deferred two designations, and Botswana’s obligation is already in force. Only Botswana requires action now.
Sources
Every change above was confirmed against the issuing authority’s own text — a gazette, a decision PDF, a tax administration’s published guide or, in the Maryland case, the court’s own orders — and each carries a verbatim quote of the operative clause in the changes feed. Aggregator and advisory reporting was used only to decide where to look.
Where a change has a country guide, the guide is linked from its record. For jurisdictions without one — Chile, Cuba, Czechia, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Peru and Slovakia this week — the record is the durable page, and the guide is queued.