It’s been quite a while since I did a tax round-up at the end of the year. Well, to be truthful, the only time was in December 2011 but I wanted to do it again. I thought I would ask my fellow tax warriors for their highlight(s) of 2014 and add my own thoughts to what they said. So that is exactly what I did …
‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’ (Douglas Adams, ‘The Salmon of Doubt’)
In a moment of weakness I did a very stupid thing – I agreed to write a book on VAT and property transactions.
In June 2013, the EU VAT Forum, set up by the Commission in July 2012 to bring together VAT authorities and business, launched the VAT cross-border rulings (‘CBR’) pilot project.
On 17th September 2014 the European Court came to the ground-breaking and, to UK practitioners, somewhat surprising decision in Skandia America Corp. (USA), filial Sverige, v Skatteverket, that a non-EU company and its dependent branch in the EU cannot be treated as a single taxable person where the branch belongs to a VAT group.
Sometimes when I find I hard to sleep after a long day tussling with impenetrable tax legislation, rather than counting sheep I play the alphabet game.
The 2014 Budget announced proposals to allow HMRC to recover tax and tax credit debts directly from taxpayers’ bank and building society accounts, including ISAs and joint accounts, without the need to go to court like everyone else.
I’ve just finished a judging stint at the Rolls Building. One of the things I did was to set aside a decision of the First-tier Tribunal on a tax credits appeal. The tribunal had no jurisdiction to hear the claimant’s appeal but went ahead and heard it anyway.
In my December 2013 blog I was banging on about incorrect transposition of EU law and the transgressions of the First-tier Tax Tribunal in the Rapid Sequence case. Well blimey, here’s another one. Luckily this time Mr Justice Nugee rode into town to sit as a judge of the Upper Tribunal. He saved the day …