Vat Fraud??

[Villagefood]

I tend to try and avoid this kind of buffoonery, but I’m bored, so here goes...

You bought an item fraudulently using your mate’s VAT number. Now you want to pretend your employer bought it and then buy it off them.

There are now four parties to this dodgy transaction, three of whom are innocent. Why not just reverse it completely.

Listen if i have to do that then i will. I am just saying that if my workplace did in fact order the item then there would not be an issue so instead of having to deal with the hassle of sending it back and ordering it again. It seems easier to just purchase it from my workplace with the added vat so that way there is no fraud and the vat is paid! Whats illegal if done that way??

 

[Johnno75]

1

Listen if i have to do that then i will. I am just saying that if my workplace did in fact order the item then there would not be an issue so instead of having to deal with the hassle of sending it back and ordering it again. It seems easier to just purchase it from my workplace with the added vat so that way there is no fraud and the vat is paid! Whats illegal if done that way??

1. Your workplace didn’t order the item. You did.

2. In doing so, you produced a third party’s VAT number to evade the VAT liability.

It seems that you’re now jumping through hoops to correct a wrong. I’m not judging, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

 

[mathepac]

I dunno, but maybe it's gone time to shut this down for further commentary. Asked and answered multiple times.

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Folks, I closed this thread as mathepac has suggested.

I have been asked to reopen it by torblednam who wants to post some fact about the tax law in this area and correct some errors. Any other posts will be deleted, so please do not respond to this thread.

Brendan

 

[torblednam]

Thanks Brendan!

Ok, there's a couple of critical things about what the OP has said here, and obviously it's in no doubt that they have perpetrated a fraud here.

They've asked how this might come to Revenue's attention. Well for starters, it seems they went through the process of ordering a TV and at the very end when presented with the opportunity to do so, they entered a VAT number. If that's an accurate version of what happened, they'll be bang to rights, as their name and billing address for payment by card will be linked to the transaction, notwithstanding the VAT number being linked to a completely different name and address.

The UK trader may be obliged to file a periodic return detailing their intracommunity sales to other registered traders, so the fact that the unwitting Irish trader has had their VAT number used will exist in a record that is shared with Irish Revenue.

Likewise, Irish VAT registered traders are supposed to include in their own periodic returns, the value of goods / services acquired from other VAT registered traders abroad.

If the trader whose number has been hijacked doesn't normally acquire goods from the UK, then there will likely be a mismatch whereby the system will show that they have made UK acquisitions (as reported by the vendor) but haven't reported any UK acquisitions themselves.

The scale of this transaction means that it's highly unlikely it would trigger a Revenue inquiry, but if for whatever reason the Irish trader has their VAT position for the period in question looked at by Revenue, then there is a quite high likelihood the intra-EU mismatch gets checked (because any vat inspector worth their salt will be all over purchases from the likes of Amazon, that aren't returned at the trader's side as clearly being likely to be personal stuff), in which case there's a clear paper trail straight back to the OP.