I am just about to submit a VAT return. The sales tax comes to £778 and the net value of sales comes to £10631. This is due to the fact that there were 2 invoices both for about £3k each which were invoiced to Russia and Norway at 0% VAT.
My question is will HMRC see these 2 figures and see the disparity and want to investigate further?
We've done similiar to Australia, we had a copy of the company registration for them over there to show they were a ligitimate company, also we had them send shipping documents to show it was being shipped out of the eu. That is all we needed to do. They may pick up on it but it you have the evidence then there is no problem. I have to point out though that this was someone doing all the shipping himself, we supplied it to him under his australian company name and he shipped it out.
There are often a mix of zero- and standard-rated sales on VAT returns; they don't seem to trigger investigations - and there's not much you can do about it anyway, sadly! So long as your documents are in place there wouldn't be a problem anyway.
