VAT issue with payments!

We are dealing with a strange situation for the past few days.

Some payments we receive through paypal are not charged with VAT at all.

Example:

UserA located in Greece pays through Paypal and is charged correctly with the net amount + VAT = total (18eur + 4.32eur = 22.32eur).

UserB located in Greece, pays through Paypal and he is not charged VAT at all! (18eur + 0eur =18.00eur total).

The above clients (UserA and UserB) are from the same country, paid for the same subscription and paid with a time difference of a few minutes.

This does not happen all the time. We had about 80 sales the last 3 days and this happened 5 times. All 5 times we had to refund the payment in order to be in compliance with the OSS EU directive.

In one of the 3 cases that we refunded, the same user, paid again without any problems. This time the VAT was charged normally!

Tax rules configuration is correct, everything was working great since 01/01/2026 that we started charging VAT and nothing has changed.

Example of Notification's raw data (Same Country, Same subscription, one is charged with VAT but the other is not)

 

Here are the invoices for the above

 

Can you please advise?

The VAT isn't applied by PayPal, but is applied at basket and then sent to PayPal. This is heavily dependent on Invoice Address. You should have invoice address set to mandatory and I recommend not pre-filling it unless you've absolutely matched your CB fields to CBSubs expected values. I suspect it's something to do with that since the second basket gets calculated properly. Is this happening only for renewals, upgrades, or new subscriptions?

Thank you for your reply Krileon.
In all the "not charged VAT" cases, the invoice address (cb_subs_inv_address_country, cb_subs_inv_address_state etccb_subs_inv_address_street etc) were filled!
The invoice address fields are populated by an auto action triggered onAfterUserApproval and onAfterLogin (for the older users) that sets field cb_subs_inv_address_country  =  value [cb_comprofiler_provinces_country], field  cb_subs_inv_address_state = [cb_comprofiler_provinces_state] etc.

There are only Upgrades on our site. Each user has a free plan, and he can upgrade to a paid plan whenever he wants. Also there are no recurring subscriptions. The subscription ends and then the user can upgrade again if he wants. 

It's possible your auto action isn't filling in country correctly or it's not happening soon enough for the basket to pick up. Normally you wouldn't use an auto action for this. You'd configure the built in mapping in CBSubs > Settings > Display > Invoices so it safely handles inheriting from your CB fields. The fields values need to match exactly what CBSubs expects though. You could try turning off that auto action for awhile, letting users fill out their invoice address at basket, and seeing if that resolves your issue.

I just refunded a subscription activated 10 mins ago...

User registered about an hour ago.
I approved user and checked the database column. The invoice address fields were filled, so the auto action did fill in country correctly.
User then decided to pay.
He paid but no vat was charged so i had to refund. Today i refunded 100 eur and probably these members will not pay again.

This does not happen to all payments, this does not happen to a particular plan, this does not happen to a particular user. This happens randomly!

Update!

The same user paid again and now the VAT was charged correctly. 
 

There must be something missing that CBSubs is expecting from the invoice data that isn't being handled by the Auto Action. I'm not sure what though as like I said you should be synchronizing using the built in settings. Please just give it a try turning off the auto action, letting them fill out invoice address at basket, and see if that resolves your issue. You're synchronizing in an unofficial manner and while yes you can do that it's not behavior CBSubs is aware of.