Hi,
The cumulative tax option allows you to have several tax rules apply at the same time to your products price.
So I suppose that you had several tax rules setup, and one without a tax rate, or with a tax rate of 0% was found and used over the other tax rule that was set with the 8% tax rate.
Activating the cumulative tax setting of your tax rules allowed the system to actually process both tax rules for the prices and thus you got your prices taxed with both 0% and 8% (or something similar to that).
Please remember to post a screenshot of the settings you're talking about next time you have an issue. It would have helped us better understand the problem, and it would also help other users coming to this thread in the future.