36In any event, in the context of the freedom to establish the conditions for a refund of overpaid VAT set out in paragraph 23 above, the Member States are entitled to lay down default interest at a flat rate in order to ensure compensation according to rules which are easily managed and supervised by the tax authorities. As the Advocate General noted in point 33 of his Opinion, although in some special cases the amount of compensatory interest may exceed the actual loss incurred by the taxable person, this is merely a result of applying compensation at a flat rate, which by its very nature reflects the loss which the taxable person might, in the view of the national legislature, incur and not the loss actually incurred. In specific cases, compensation in the form of interest may be greater or less than the actual loss.