BT Taken To Court By Customer Over Direct Debit Contract

[EXC]

Re: BT Taken To Court By Customer Over Direct Debit Contract

Their point shouldn't be "it costs more" but "it's the price and it's up to us what to charge"

I take it your background's not in public relations then?

[argentarius]

Re: BT Taken To Court By Customer Over Direct Debit Contract

Obviously not.

But I find it frustrating that BT keep, basically, lying about the reason for the charge. The reason for the charge is that they want to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. But pretending it's a recharge of costs they are incurring is simply untrue.

As Vortex says, it would be far more acceptable to (most) people if it was merely presented as a direct debit payment discount. But once again, BT aren't configuring it like this because they are doing it as a VAT-mitigation wheeze. To some extent they have painted themselves into a corner, because if they can't demonstrate the additional costs they are in severe danger of getting penalised for VAT evasion.

I'm sure some of you will be aware that the retailers attempted a very similar VAT evasion wheeze (whereby you paid 98p for your shopping and 2p in the £ for card handling charges, which were VAT exempt) and it was disallowed (on appeal) after operating for a number of years.

I'm sure also that BT think they have a good case for their charge being somehow different to the retailers' situation. But there's a large degree of similarity between the two schemes. The primary difference is that, in BT's case, the payment handling charge is actually being passed on to the end customer, whereas in the retailers' case, it was being paid by the retailers (albeit that notionally they were discounting the goods by the amount of the handling fee, and then the customer was paying the handling fee to the card handling company).