United Kingdom: FTT Rejects Unatrade VAT Appeal Over Missing Invoices

• The FTT dismissed Unatrade’s appeal and upheld HMRC’s reduction of input VAT recovery from £151,368.73 to £15,136.88.
• Unatrade failed to provide valid VAT purchase invoices for luxury goods purchases, and the alternative evidence supplied did not show the VAT charged on the transactions.
• The tribunal held HMRC was not wrong to refuse discretion to accept alternative evidence, because the discretion is only to correct defective invoices, not to allow deduction without evidence of VAT charged.
• HMRC’s use of extrapolation was upheld, as it had checked 99% of purchases in the tested period and found no evidence of VAT charged, and Unatrade provided no contrary evidence.
• The tribunal also rejected Unatrade’s argument that it could not obtain the documents from suppliers, noting it had not actually asked for them.

Source: claritaxnews.com

Note that this post was (partially) written with the help of AI. It is always useful to review the original source material, and where needed to obtain (local) advice from a specialist.

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