After having received more than 1,700 responses to the consultation paper (“Green Paper”) on the future of EU VAT, the European Commission published a Communication in which it set out its views on the fundamental features of the future VAT system and listed the priority areas for further action in the years to come. In this article, the authors give an overview of the Commission’s views and, in order to assess whether it is a recipe for growth, benchmark the proposed system against a best-practice VAT system.