Kafka logs into an online coffee store and…

Sometimes I could only admire the zeal of the German bureaucrats (via Cato at Liberty): Germany spent more than 30 times as much collecting taxes on coffee beans ordered online from abroad than it received in the tax revenues, the accounting office said on Tuesday. Some 4,000 Germans who bought coffee over the Internet from ...

Sometimes I could only admire the zeal of the German bureaucrats (via Cato at Liberty):

Sometimes I could only admire the zeal of the German bureaucrats (via Cato at Liberty):

Germany spent more than 30 times as much collecting taxes on coffee beans ordered online from abroad than it received in the tax revenues, the accounting office said on Tuesday.

Some 4,000 Germans who bought coffee over the Internet from other EU countries but failed to pay the coffee tax have been charged between a few cents to 10 euros ($14.81) in taxes and fees, said Dieter Engels, head of Germany’s Federal Accounting Office.

Tax collectors ended up with just 25,000 euros, way below the 800,000 euros in the costs of staff charged with collecting the payments, Engels said.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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