Many people believe that VAT professionals are wizards. Or sorcerers, even. This is partly because VAT rules are packed with exceptions, special regimes, and conditions that only seem to make sense if you’ve trained at Hogwarts. But it’s also because VAT people often find solutions that others can hardly believe are possible.

You may remember the first time you saw a magician pull a coin from behind someone’s ear or reveal your card from inside a sealed envelope. Tricks! Smoke and mirrors! It’s a pity that most of us grow out of believing in magic—because sometimes it feels great to believe in something that doesn’t really exist.

And sometimes, what looks like magic is just a misunderstanding.

Take “Hocus Pocus,” for example. Long before the Bible was widely available in print, peasants in medieval Europe would attend church and hear priests, in Latin, intone “Hoc est corpus” (“This is the body [of Christ]”) during Communion. Being illiterate and unfamiliar with Latin, the congregants misheard it as something mystical and nonsensical: “Hocus Pocus.” And that, surprisingly, is how we ended up with one of the most well-known expressions for magic and illusion.

VAT has its own language, too—one that often sounds mysterious to outsiders. Phrases like “place of supply,” “reverse charge,” “input VAT deduction,” and “triangulation” might sound like spells to the uninitiated. Even the phrase “Europe has a VAT-tax” (which pops up all too often) sounds a bit off to us. “VAT” already stands for “Value Added Tax,” so “VAT-tax” is like saying “PIN number.” Redundant—and mildly painful to hear.

But that’s the thing: every profession has its own magical world. For us, VAT specialists, it’s the VAT-world. A place where fiction sometimes meets fiscal reality, and where logic has to bend just enough to fit within the Directive.

As one counselor once put it in a VAT case we love to quote:

“Beyond the everyday world, both counsel have explained to us, lies the world of VAT, a kind of fiscal theme park in which factual and legal realities are suspended or inverted.”

That’s not a trick. That’s just VAT.

So while we can’t pull rabbits out of hats (yet), we can navigate EU VAT Directive 2006/112/EC with our eyes closed—and make impossible-looking VAT puzzles disappear in a puff of (legal) logic.

And no, we don’t wear pointy hats. Usually.