Applying VAT to financial services : is the new "mobile-ratio method" adequate for insurance?

Applying Value Added Tax (VAT) to financial services is difficult. Several more or less complex methods for handling financial services within a VAT system have been developed, none of them being fully satisfactory. In 2018, Julio López-Laborda and Guillermo Peña have published “A New Method for Applying VAT to Financial Services” in the National Tax Journal (vol. 71 (1), pp. 155–181), called “mobile-ratio method”. This paper examines whether the new method is adequate for insurance services. It reveals that the analogy between insurance services and other financial services, while amazing at first glance, does not reach far enough to make the “mobile-ratio method” practically applicable to insurance services.