VAT/Tax Request

Two things I'd like, one as a standard feature and the other as a UK Mod:

In the UK, when a domestic buyer purchases a VAT item (and the supplier is VAT registered) we have to charge VAT on the item. This is normally 20%. So a £10 net sale is £12 gross (including VAT). OpenCart supports this absolutely fine through the Geozone/VAT rate/VAT zone system.

However, when someone from outside the UK buys the same item, VAT is not chargable. Again, OpenCart supports this fine. What I'd like to do however is still charge these people the full £12 but for it to be net with 0% VAT declared in the order_total table. That way the customer's getting charged what they expect to be charged and we're pocketing what would normally be the 20% VAT.

Next up is an HMRC requirement...

For some goods like books and children's clothes, VAT is not charged. To complicate things further, VAT can be a fairly random percentage for 'mixed VAT' products - e.g. a book with an accompanying CD. OpenCart supports mixed VAT fine on a product level but the problem comes with the shipping.

HMRC says that VAT on shipping should follow the product that's being shipped. So for a 20% product, the VAT should be charged and at 20%. For books it should be 0%. Opencart does not support varying the VAT on shipping depending on the products within the cart.

HMRC don't really seem to care about the precise calculation, only that it's fair. My personal feeling is that it should be split by order value. So for example, a transaction could be:

9x books at £10 each (0% VAT) and 1xCD at £10 (+20% VAT). With a postage fee of £2.95, the amount of postage that would be vatable is a tenth of the order's total value. So it follows that only 10% of the £2.95 postage should be vatable - 29.5p.

Thus in this circumstance, the postage would be £2.24 + 24.8p (+5p VAT), £2.95 in total.

It seems overly complicated for only 5p of VAT revenue I know but what HMRC *want* people to do is say sod it and VAT every order's shipping. It is of course not necessary with the right scripts and not so many rounding errors.

Could this be something someone could develop?