Big problem with eu tax id field if it is required

Dear Tuan,
we have a big problem with the eu tax id field. At our form this field is required. But if someone from a non-eu-country wants to send this form, he cannot do this, because there is a message "this field is required".
How can we solve this problem?
Normally this field should not be required, if someone is not from eu country and it should be required if he is.
Can you help?
Sigrid

Hi

Could you please edit the custom field, set Required to No and check it again to see whether it is being required ?

Tuan

Dear Tuan,
if we set required to "no" of course it isn't required. But we NEED Required for EU Countries. And we also have customers from other countries.
Sigrid

Hi Sigrid

For now, I think you will need to leave that field as optional. Right now, I don't force users to enter data for that field if they are from EU countries (what if someone from EU countries but he doesn't have a valid EU VAT number ?) ? I don't see any customers request for this option, so am afraid of I could not make this change to the system as it might break the feature from existing customer's website

Regards,

Tuan

Dear Tuan,
we solved this problem by making overrides, but I want to describe our problem.
Your question was: If someone from EU countries doesn't have a valid EU VAT number?
Since 2015 there is a new EU tax law for offers of electronic business services.
The result of this is, that we cannot issue invoices to companies in the EU who do not have EU VAT ID (excluding German companies).
Thus only companies within the EU can order a membership if they have an EU VAT ID.
Sigrid.

OK Sigrid. To be honest, I don't really understand the EU tax rules, so I am unsure about it. Please use the override for now. If there are more customers asking for it, I will implement the change into the core download package

Strange that none of other customers complain about this behavior

Regards,

Tuan

About complaining of other customers about this behavior: Perhaps the other users don't set this field as required and they hope, that everybody has an eu tax id. And if they don't have an eu tax id, they have 3 possibilities:
1. they hope, the tax authority will not notice this
2. they decline this customer and they transfer back the membership fee
3. if they have enough financial or personnel resources: they accept the customer and make a tax returns in the EU Country of their customer (we don't have these resources)
Sigrid