Cycle to Work dealer upping advertised price.

Irish Law aside, intra EU selling requires an invoice must be provided when selling across borders to individuals. I hope your boss is taking you aside to have a word with you about what you should and should not post online. I would be raging if an employee was implicating me in facilitating tax fraud.

Apparently but they are a VAT registered company (apparently, I can't find their VAT number but I didn't look hard). This means they should be returning their VAT accounts on a regular basis and it would be clear that they should be claiming back the polish VAT and administering Irish VAT on their total price. Even as a forward shipper, the companies they get the gear forwarded from should be providing an invoice as required by EU law for intra EU shipments.

It is entirely possible that they do not realise what they are doing is wrong and also that their accountant is missing a trick, but still, it is quite shocking in this day and age that they have gotten away with this error for so long.

Apologies, this is different to what you said before, someone along the line should be applying VAT and customs. If your a market place, inside the EU, the company sending the bike still has to supply an invoice to the customer. If they are as you say, not doing this, how do people deal with warranty claims, etc. I think there is something lost in translation here because in my mind, it doesn't make sense.

At this point it is hard to tell as your story changes each time by a bit, someone is committing fraud if as you say bikes are being imported into the state without VAT being paid at any point. So you are either not accounting for VAT properly (costing you and your customers money, but may not be illegal, just silly), or you are facilitating the sale of goods without the payment of Tax and are complicit in the circumvention of tax payment to the state. Judging by this comment though, it would appear you know that your supplier is not following the law and are helping accommodate this for your own benefit. Either way, revenue will not be impressed.

For bike to work, that is exactly what they do. For non bike to work they claim to act as a forward shipper, which depending on how they do it, might mean you are buying from a random other company. You are right though, in the first example for bike to work, they buy from Poland and either pay Polish VAT or are sold it ex VAT and they add it on, either way the difference in price for doing this should really only be a couple of euro as they either claim the Polish VAT back or get it sent ex VAT so it is cheaper.

They seem to charge 23% more doing the former, which means they are either

a) adding a cost on for being the shop, nothing wrong with that and is absolutely fine but calling it VAT isn't

b) they are buying it ex VAT, again fine, and adding it on, this is also fine but it means that if the price you pay as a direct customer is ex VAT. That implies the company they are acting as a forward shipper for are evading tax and they are by proxy facilitating it (as they seem to know this is happening). No one on line is getting stung for customs so it all seems a bit weird but not impossible, still not above board.

c) they have a really awful accountant, the forward shipping company are in fact paying VAT and they are not reclaiming it.

They do not have their VAT number on their website which is both unusual (but not illegal AFAIK) so it is hard to check are they VAT registered but their rep has said they pay a lot to revenue, way over the VAT registration limit so presumably they are.

Either way, it appears that you get a good deal unless you have an issue with your bike, in which case you will wish you went through a local bike shop based on the FB reviews.