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VAT Gap in the Budget in UK

By April 23, 2015July 10th, 2021No Comments

From 1 April 2015 the registration threshold is increased to £82,000 and at the same time the threshold for deregistration is increased to £80,000 – cancellation of your VAT registration is optional …

No great excitement on VAT – but uncollected VAT to remain stubbornly around 10%

From 1 April 2015 the registration threshold is increased to £82,000 and at the same time the threshold for deregistration is increased to £80,000 – cancellation of your VAT registration is optional below this threshold. There is no change to the Distance Selling Threshold of £70,000 this being the UK’s implementation of the high €100,000 threshold (which would equate to approximately £72,000 at current exchange rates).

The decision in the CJEU case involving Credit Lyonnais is to be implemented for partial exemption years beginning on or after 1 August 2015 – you will no longer be able to include the turnover of overseas branches within partial exemption calculations. This change mainly impacts on the largest of partly exempt businesses such as banks and insurers. Draft legislation has been circulated and is available from the Association.

From 1 April 2015, VAT refund schemes become operative for medical courier charities and palliative care charities. In the case of the latter, there has been consistent lobbying to align hospices with state hospitals on their VAT costs, and this is a move in the right direction. It is intended that fee paying health care, even when provided by a charity, would not benefit from this change.

New figures for the 2014 UK VAT Gap have also been published – the VAT Gap is the difference between what the Government could collect and what it does collect. The difference is made up by losses from insolvency, taxpayer errors, avoidance, fraud and errors in calculating the theoretical VAT Yield. For 2014 10.3% of UK VAT was not collected – £12,100,000,000 (approximately €16,840,000,000). The latest estimate for 2015 was also published on 18 March 2015 – in percentage terms it is estimated to sit at around 10% for the coming six years. The 2014 outturn in the Publication by the Office for Budget Responsibility is 10.8%, not 10.3% as published by the Treasury (which may explain why the figures were so hard to find).

 

Steve Botham
Covertax Chartered Tax Advisers