tag: tax litigation

For years now, opportunities to reclaim VAT on bad debts have come up again and again. Although many had thought they had definitely missed the boat on this one, taxpayers have just been given one last chance.

For the first time, the Supreme Court ruled on the merits concerning the refund of VAT on bad debts – and the decision was in favour of taxpayers. The judgments serve as a guideline in a number of similar cases, and may even help taxpayers with refunds claimed under the rules that came into force in 2020.

Reclaiming VAT on bad debts under the new 2020 rules may well conjure up images of a TV show obstacle course.  Initial experiences suggest that anyone trying to reclaim VAT will be up against the wall. But the undertaking isn’t unfeasible.

Recently, a Hungarian court accepted the right of a taxpayer to recover VAT on a bad debt where the VAT claim has already elapsed. The court made it clear that the statute of limitations does not count from the day of the original invoice but from the date when the debt became definitively irrecoverable. This decision may give hope to taxpayers in many pending cases.

A recently released NAV guidance gives a list of those signs that could indicate that a security firm is involved in VAT fraud. The list will certainly help companies that accept invoices from such security firms, but it’s still a pity that the guidance wasn’t issued ten years earlier.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has declared in a recent case that when checking VAT transactions, the tax authority cannot ignore examining the full budgetary impact. Thus it is not acceptable for the authorities to deny the right of VAT deduction to a taxpayer without allowing the other taxpayer to accordingly reclaim the VAT that it paid. Furthermore, the court also found it unacceptable for the tax authority to base a fine only on the amount of the VAT deducted unlawfully without examining the tax shortfall actually caused. The ruling can be considered as another important step towards the creation of a fair VAT system.

Companies are faced with countless situations where, for reasons beyond their control, they are unable to collect the money owed to them, including its VAT part. In such cases the tax authority often refuses to allow the reclaim of the lost VAT even where this would not incur a loss for the budget. Based on recent judgements by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), however, the VAT should be recoverable in many cases of this kind.

Due to a seemingly trivial error, a series of NAV decisions are being overturned in court: a good many of them don’t contain the proper signature. This procedural error, however, could be useful not only in ongoing lawsuits, but possibly in past, closed procedures too – hundreds of businesses could claw back the tax forints they thought were lost for good.