Originally Posted by
Globaliser
Have they actually positively said that they do not use the information for VAT purposes? It's not quite what I take from the post in which you first reported this:-(Emphasis added.)
There are a number of possible meanings of this, but given that Boots does sell stuff that is not zero-rated, "data statistics" could include statistics that justify a particular approach to the payment of VAT to HMRC. It seems to me that the only way in which Boots could not need at all to collect any information about pax destinations is if it had taken a policy decision not to claim any zero-rated sales of items that would normally not be zero-rated, on the grounds of those goods being exported by the pax.
That's interesting.
What Boots said to me in its reply was "I have checked this with the store manager at T5 Heathrow Airport and they have advised me that no personal customer information is passed on to any third parties, and once any boarding pass is scanned it is used solely for Data statistics."
Whilst they did not explicitly say something like "we do not use the information scanned for tax reporting purposes", I did not think it was unreasonable to infer something along those lines (as I did) from what they did say.
I take the point that sometimes wording can be used to generalise or, even, perhaps, obfuscate what is actually happening, but I just think that it requires an unreasonable jump (inference and meaning-wise) to describe the processes that they would need to go through for VAT reporting etc (which, at the end of the day, are processes of accounting, arithmetic and obtaining/retaining evidence) as "Data statistics" with "no personal customer information is passed on to any third parties".
Having said that, I accept that they did not express to me that they did not use the data for VAT purposes.
So, I am happy for folks to consider my previous comments with the overriding caveat that
"It is my reasonable understanding, from what Boots has said to me, that…"…
Murky waters indeed…