31 October 2018
Brexit
UK government is confident that deal will be reached before year end. UK will cease* to be a member of the EU from 29 March 2019, but will have market access until 31 December 2020. *unless 2nd referendum held.
The Taxation (Cross Border) Act 2018 will come into effect 01 April 2019 regardless of Brexit outcome/deals.
More details to follow regarding EC Sales List and Intrastat and whether Boxes 8 and 9 will fall off VAT return.
No Deal Scenario
Postponed accounting for input VAT to be implemented. This will treat imports like reverse charge, the C79 will be replaced with something else, import VAT will be both due to HMRC and reclaimable from HMRC at same time. Mechanism not quite confirmed but objective is to reclaim input tax in same month as it is incurred.
Low Value Consignment Relief will be scrapped. New system will be introduced in January 2021.
Making Tax Digital
Transmission of transaction based supplementary data will not be possible at first, but then voluntarily. Currently, only 9 boxes have to be submitted.
MTD pilot now active. Businesses will be allowed to test in the MTD pilot. HMRC want to check that their computer systems are ready before expanding the pilot further. Businesses may wish to partake of the trial to get ahead of the game. So that come April 2019, businesses on the pilot will have advanced more so than those businesses only just adapting to MTD.
There will be no dedicated MTD help line, so perhaps another reason to consider using the pilot for businesses :)
General Information
Across many of the VAT departments, such as option to tax, change of address, non-statutory clearances - HMRC are working to a 45-50 working day turnaround time. This is now the new norm, historical charters to respond quickly to taxpayers, now long forgotten. Am advised that the option to tax unit is gaining some additional resources but about 10 years too late in my opinion.
VAT can get complicated and is a constantly changing landscape, so don't leave VAT to chance, speak to your advisors or speak to us, advice is not as expensive as you think.
