Rev. Comm. statement: 8yo outstanding VAT liabilty in 2003. Records kept for 7yrs.

J

Josiah

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I have received a statement from the Rev. Comm. to the effect that I have an outstanding VAT liabilty of over 1K from Jan-Feb 2003. To my knowledge this is the first correspondence re this liability.

My records go back 7 years, the Rev. Comm web site says that I must keep records for 6 years. I therfore have no way of knowing if the Rev. Comm are making a mistake. Can they legally make a claim after the statutory period of record keeping?
 
Yes


Contact your accountants from that period, they may have their file for that year in storage, no doubt a reconciliation would have been performed as part of their working papers
 
I will check tommorrow, but I don't think he has any records others than the returns he filled.

It seems unreasonable to me for the Rev Comm to make a claim after 8 years with no previous correspondence. Where have they been? If a business is liable after the statutory period of record keeping surely we should be warned that we a still liable after that period.
 
The requirement for you to keep records for 6 years has nothing to do with how long you remain liable for an unpaid liability.

If they say you owe a balance from 2003 this should be based on a VAT return you submitted in 2003. So I suppose the question should be whether you think they have made a mistake in recording your VAT return details (like if you always paid by a cheque enclosed with your VAT return then you might have grounds to think something is amiss...).
 
There is no time limit on how long tax is owed. You need to find out from revenue how they are calculating this 1K liability from. It's a very worrying trend if revenue are going to trawel through people's accounts from 9 years ago to try and discover low amounts which is no doubt a mistake n the taxpayers part and will no doubt lead to lots of penalties and interest.
 
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