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A review of the cases on reasonable excuse for late payment of VAT to discover what may prove acceptable.
KEY POINTS
- Inability to pay cannot be a reasonable excuse (VATA 1994 s 71).
- Make sure to keep evidence of contact with HMRC.
- Apply for time-to-pay arrangement in good time.
- Always check banking arrangements are up to date.
- The fault for late payment may rest with HMRC.
The American philosopher John Dewey is credited with the quotation: ‘Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.’
The problem is that in VAT an error-strewn education can be more expensive than going to Eton. It is a lot cheaper to trawl through First-tier Tribunal decisions for an idea of what goes wrong – the mistakes other people make the defences that do and do not work...
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