Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.
cash stock photo
istock_norasit_kaewsai_aw

VAT: Common sense prevails over credit notes

by
6th Aug 2019
Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

The upper tribunal has ruled that no output tax adjustment is permitted on credit notes unless a refund has been given to the customer.

Imagine the following situation: you make an advance payment to a builder for £50,000 + VAT to refurbish your office, a total payment of £60,000. Your business is fully taxable (not partly exempt), so you can claim the £10,000 input tax charge on the builder’s invoice.

However, the builder suffers a heart attack and is unable to complete the job, so he agrees to fully refund you. He issues a credit note for £50,000 + VAT to adjust his original invoice.

This is a contractual obligation because his contract said that he would make a refund if the work was not carried out as agreed. However, the bad news is that you don’t receive your refund because his company goes into liquidation soon after the credit note is raised. How should you report these transactions on your VAT returns?

VAT problem?

If you applied the logic of the taxpayer in the case of Inventive Tax Strategies Ltd (In Liquidation) [2019] UKUT 0221 plus three others (herein referred to as ITS), the aborted job would actually cost you £60,000 and not £50,000. This is quite bizarre, but the logic works like this:

  • Your payment of £60,000 to the builder is reduced to £50,000 because you will claim input tax on the purchase invoice.
  • You enter the credit note through your records.
  • Your input tax claim is cancelled out to zero.
  • The net cost of the job is now £60,000, because the credit note will never result in a refund.

The case

If you substitute the office refurbishment work in my builder example for tax advice relating to SDLT avoidance schemes, you have the facts of the ITS case. Customers paid an advance fee for tax advice but the scheme in question failed, so they were entitled to a full refund and a credit note was therefore raised by ITS.

However, no refund was made because the companies concerned went into liquidation.

This case was originally heard by the FTT back in 2017, and the judge concluded that the reduced output tax claimed by the taxpayer on their VAT returns had been rightly disallowed by HMRC because there had been no refund paid for the supplies in question.

Arguments

HMRC argued that in order for ITS to reduce its output tax, there must be “an actual transfer of that consideration” to the customer – in other words, no refund means no output tax credit. The taxpayer’s view was that it had a contractual obligation to provide a refund because the SDLT scheme was “unsuccessful” and this produced a “decrease in consideration” that met the conditions of the VAT Regulations 1995, Reg 38 and therefore an output tax reduction was justified on these grounds.

The outcome

The judge placed great emphasis on the commercial and economic reality of the situation and dismissed the taxpayer’s appeal: “there has not been an actual repayment and it is not at all clear that there will be any repayment at all. In those circumstances, it is not possible to say that the ‘price has been reduced’ in any commercially or economically real sense.”

In other words, the commercial reality was that ITS had provided tax services and received a fee, and there was no entitlement to reduce the output tax paid on this fee because the company had received consideration which they never repaid.

Conclusion

I think that most readers will be reassured by this decision because the outcome of the ITS proposal would be very unfair and a moral challenge to our favourite tax.

As the UT commented in its report, a taxpayer victory would have produced the ridiculous outcome of the taxpayer having received a standard-rated fee but accounted for no output tax without refunding customers who, had they been VAT registered, would have suffered an input tax clawback because of the credit notes issued under Regulation 38. In summary, common sense has prevailed!

Replies (4)

Please login or register to join the discussion.

avatar
By Steven Dring
07th Aug 2019 10:17

Morning Neil,
I feel I'm being a little slow today but I don't follow the above.
Are you saying that the customer would need to enter the £10k vat on the credit note on their vat return?
Thus meaning they will be £60k out of pocket instead of £50k?

Thanks (0)
Replying to Steven Dring:
avatar
By Justin Bryant
07th Aug 2019 14:18

The decision sensibly means (I believe) that a VAT registered customer does not have to do that (i.e. assuming they do not actually receive the purported refund due to the supplier's liquidation etc.) and so will remain down £50k rather than £60k.

Thanks (1)
avatar
By Mukkarram Ali
07th Aug 2019 11:06

Nice article and thanks for the useful info.

Thanks (0)
avatar
By maasrw
07th Aug 2019 11:30

I'm not reassured by the decision. it smacks of "we are going to get the taxpayer because we don't approve of his business". I don't myself see why there should be a different VAT effect if I say to a client, "I will only bill you if I win", or if I say "my fee is X but I will refund it if I lose". In both cases my fee is contingent on my winning. The amount due cannot be ascertained until it is known whether I win or lose. How can it make a difference whether I have the money in the interim or the client does, but that seems to be the result of that decision. it is equally irrational that I can claim input tax without paying the bill but if I don't pay it apparently cannot cancel the tax out by a credit note because I have not been "repaid".
Robert

Thanks (0)