The new WEEE regulations governing electrical goods are likely to be a minefields for merchants warn Progressive Solutions — but they say that their updated software could help.
Software company Progressive Solutions have urged merchants to work closely with their software providers to ensure that they fully abide by the new EC guidelines on electrical appliances.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive (WEEE) aims to minimise the impact of the electrical goods on the environment by increasing the reuse and recycling of electrical appliances and reducing the amount that goes to landfill. This means an extra tax has been added to electrical appliances on top of VAT, which must feature as a separate charge on receipts and invoices.
“We’ve spoken to UK users and we’re finding that hardly any of them have even heard of the WEEE regulations,” says Robert Collins, Progressive Solutions Operations Director. “I think that’s pretty much the case across the board, which is quite worrying.”
Collins believes that for those who are aware of the law, it is difficult to know how the regulations should be implemented.
“The legislation isn’t clear, there’s no case law yet and the guidelines on this are, in my opinion, not very clever. When they implemented this in Ireland they had really good series of information sheets about when it applies, how to record it and so on. Not only did they send that to the merchants, they also sent it to the relevant software houses. You compare that with the UK attitude, the regulations are drafted and clear but they don’t give any information on how to implement them.”
Despite this lack of clarity, it seems likely that if the charge is not added to transactions involving electrical appliances, the business will be liable to pay the charge. According to Collins, the difficulty is that no one is quite sure how rigorously it will be implemented.
“It’s a potential minefield for merchants. It applies to all kinds of electrical appliances right down to a ten quid fluorescent tube; it’s not just big-ticket items. The way to look at this is to go into a place like Currys and see how they are dealing with it. They are actually starting to put the waste electrical charge on some of their ticket labels. But it should apply to all sorts of appliances. I don’t think anyone would pass a rigorous inspection at the moment.”
The law was effective from June of this year. The extra tax has to be marked on as a WEEE charge, separate from the main price of the item on the receipt and the invoice.
“If they don’t give clear guidelines for the regulations it will take the average software house roughly nine months to interpret and implement changes to their own systems,” says Collins. “There’s going to be a significant lag between the law becoming active and merchants catching on to it.”
Collins believes that once the legislation has been implemented, the greatest risk for merchants will be from their own staff, and that measures must be taken to ensure that the risk is completely removed.
“It’s likely that in many merchants, the management will add this charge and the salesman will think: ‘My customer isn’t interested in this charge, he just wants a deal on this appliance.’ They’re likely to take the charge off to give their customer a deal, but then the company is liable for that charge,” he says. “That’s the problem that merchants are now facing; unless they rigorously apply it they’re liable, as I understand it.
“We need to be able to apply software that applies the regulations without the merchant having to think about it. The system has to be smart enough so that if the user tries to delete it [the charge], the product will be removed as well.”
Progressive Solutions have started updating their software so that the WEEE charge is automatically added to an order separately from the main cost once an order is added to the system.
“It meets the regulations as we understand them,” says Collins. The only reason we could do that was by talking to our Irish clients and taking copies of their guidelines. We made the assumption that the Irish guidelines would be acceptable for the UK, though I can’t say anyone’s had an inspection yet.”
For a summary of the WEEE Regulations please visit the BMJ website at www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
© 2007. Kindly reproduced courtesy of Builders Merchants Journal.
