The Norwegian Government proposes to impose VAT on the purchase of electronic services abroad. That means sales tax on e-books, e-magazines, games and other software.

This also applies to music services like Spotify. This is due to be effective from 1 July 2011.

It was the Norwegian Minister of Finance, Sigbjørn Johnson who announced this in the bugdet for 2011.

The current VAT in Norway is 25%, printed books has been excepted from the VAT, but this new suggestion will apply to E-books.

It has been said that enforcing the tax will be hard. As there are thousands of online retailers who will be reqired to collect the tax from the Norwegian customer, and then send the collected tax to Norway.

Those retailers applying the tax will have weakened competition ability, opposed to those not collecting the VAT. Will you collect the VAT when you sell to a Norwegian customer?