Starting Tomorrow, 1st January 2015, the way VAT is calculated for our European Union located customers will change. Until now we had to add 21% VAT to all EU customers as the VAT rate in Czech Republic, where our company is registered and located is 21%.

In 2015 this will change, however. The VAT will be based on the standard VAT rate in the country of the customer, as selected in the order form. For most customers the difference will be negligible, although customers in the more “socialistic” countries will have to pay more.

Please keep in mind this change is required by new EU laws and we hate it as much as any other EU merchant as it adds significant complexity to already complicated tax laws.

Standard VAT rates in EU countries (plus Monaco which shares EU VAT laws with France) are as below:

Austria          20%
Belgium          21%
Bulgaria          20%
Croatia            25%
Cyprus          19%
Czech Republic         21%
Denmark          25%
Estonia          20%
Finland          24%
France          20%
Germany          19%
Greece          23%
Hungary          27%
Ireland          23%
Italy              22%
Latvia          21%
Lithuania          21%
Luxembourg          15%
Malta              18%
Monaco (French VAT)    20%
Netherlands          21%
Poland          23%
Portugal          23%
Romania          24%
Slovakia          20%
Slovenia          22%
Spain              21%
Sweden          25%
United Kingdom        20%

We are currently experiencing technical issues with our FR5 server. The datacenter has been already notified so far we have no details about the issue. We expect the server to be back online in less than 48 hours.

I apologize for the inconvenience, please connect via one of our many other servers if possible.

UPDATE, December 30: The FR5 server had its main hard drive replaced and had to be reinstalled completely. It is now back online again. I apologize for the delay.

Earlier Today some customers reported a problem when launching their Identity Cloaker application on Windows PCs. “Invalid CRL” error message appeared during the launch. We have been able to fix the bug and a new version of Identity Cloaker is now available in the member area.

You can also use this download link directly:

http://www.identitycloaker.com/download/IDC2_Setup.exe

The new version number is 2.0.47 . While this bug does not seem to affect every user, we suggest you update to the newest version anyway.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Please also note that this issue does not affect Identity Cloaker Portable or Identity Cloaker for OS X.

UPDATE: It seems the OS X version is affected as well, although with a different error message. We are investigating the issue already, please bear with us in the meanwhile. The OS X version is now working again. If you still get “Connection to main server failed” error with your OS X version, please contact our helpdesk. Also, make sure you are using this latest OS X version:

http://www.identitycloaker.com/download/osx/IdentityCloaker-0.5.6-osx-installer.app.dmg