The history of VAT implementation is also the history of the resistance to its adoption. This article reconstructs the VAT’s emergence from its earliest formulations in the works of Wilhelm von Siemens in Germany, Thomas Adams in the United States, and the studies on measuring the gross domestic product and Carl Shoup’s work. The aim of this historical reconstruction is to highlight and analyse its most fundamental aspects from which a broader resistance to its implementation will be examined: specifically the resistance articulated by service-providing firms that argued that a VAT would discriminate against them. This criticism was first raised by the Reich Ministry of Finance even before the publication of Siemens’s ‘Veredelte Umsatzsteuer’. It reappeared decades later when it was examined by John Due and has gained striking relevance in the ongoing debate surrounding the implementation of Brazil’s consumption tax reform. The conceptual framework developed in the historical overview provides all of the necessary elements to show – more precisely than previous accounts – that this criticism stems from a misunderstanding of how value-added taxation operates.
Intertax