Own-name intermediaries count as resellers for Swedish VAT

A taxable person that takes part in a supply of services in its own name but for another person's account is deemed to have acquired the services and to supply them onward itself.Skatteverket The service is therefore sold in two legs — from the principal to the intermediary and from the intermediary to the customerSkatteverket — and no separate brokerage service is suppliedSkatteverket.

The test for own-name intermediation has two cumulative limbs.Skatteverket First, the intermediary must have control over the supply to the buyer: a decisive influence over the circumstances that matter for the service reaching the buyer, assessed on all the facts of each case.Skatteverket Indications include choosing who performs the service, as when a dispatcher assigns the driver for a passenger transport; holding the licence needed to bring sellers and buyers together, such as a taxi booking-centre permit; handling practical commitments toward the buyer, such as receiving arrival notices, handing over keys and taking responsibility for cleaning in short-stay accommodation; and setting the price the buyer pays or instructing the seller where or when to perform.

Second, the intermediary must appear as the buyer's counterparty.Skatteverket Indications include marketing, contracts, booking confirmations or receipts in the intermediary's name framed so that it reads as the counterparty; an undertaking to compensate the buyer if the service is not performed as agreed, with any right of recourse against the seller irrelevant; and bearing the financial risk toward the buyer on credit sales.

EU case law adds that own-name intermediation requires a mandate to take part in the supply for the principal's accountSkatteverket, and that the buyer's knowledge of the principal's identity does not exclude it; what matters above all is the intermediary's powers in the supply. Betting agents that take bets in their own name for a bookmaker fall inside this fiction, as does a collective management organisation that licenses protected musical works and collects the fees in its own name. By contrast, a healthcare platform that steered patients to providers but undertook no obligation to see that the requested care materialised supplied administrative matchmaking services, not own-name brokerage of healthcare (HFD 2023 ref. 13)Skatteverket.

The same rules settle when a service counts as supplied. A supply of services is any transaction that is not a supply of goods, judged objectively regardless of purpose or result.Skatteverket It requires at least two identifiable parties with a mutual agreementSkatteverket, so supplies within a single taxable subjectSkatteverket and own-account activity such as bitcoin mining fall outside. A service is generally supplied when the agreed work is complete, even if the buyer never uses itSkatteverket; purely chance-based compensation, such as payment conditional on a competition placing, is not taxableSkatteverket; continuous services such as rentals are supplied successivelySkatteverket; and construction work counts only where performed on another person's propertySkatteverket.

Illegal sales are normally still taxable:Skatteverket assistance with cheating on the högskoleprovet remains within VAT despite its criminalisation on 31 August 2016Skatteverket (HFD 2025 ref. 34)Skatteverket. Payments under a municipal development agreement (exploateringsavtal) are not consideration for a directly linked service where the developer neither requested the works nor holds rights in them (HFD 2026 ref. 33).Skatteverket

Legal basis: 5 kap. 26–27 §§ mervärdesskattelag (2023:200)Skatteverket and Articles 24, 25 and 28 of the VAT Directive (2006/112/EC)Skatteverket.