The VAT system is the most wasteful tax that I can think of.
You add 20% of VAT it to your product/service, gov rips you of these 20% then the next year they gave it back to you.
What a waist of time/resources.
If they wanted to ripoff customers of +20% of the initial price they should have made the obligations to the customers and not the merchant.
But I guess that people would have been outraged and the current system is to avoid bigger political backslash.