Filing duty

The Tax and Customs Administration will impose a penalty on you if you fail to comply with your filing duty.

Case in point

Having omitted to file its corporation tax return for 2010/2011, a private limited-liability company was promptly served with an ex officio tax assessment in the amount of € 6,900 by the Tax and Customs Administration. The set-off of the company’s losses resulted in a taxable amount of nil … which unfortunately was augmented by a default surcharge in the amount of € 2,460 for having failed to file.

Not to be outdone, the company took the matter to court, where it argued that it had been unable to log on to the Tax and Customs Administration’s web site, but had filed the tax on paper. The inspector of taxes countered by stating that the relevant hard copy had never been received and that its web site had not been affected by outages at the time.

Filing duty

The company pleaded duress owing to the “carnival of errors” at the Tax and Customs Administration. The court was decidedly underwhelmed by this argument as the company proved unable to identify what exactly had gone wrong.

When the company’s track record additionally confirmed that the company had failed to file its tax returns for several years running, the Court of Appeal ruled that the company had not made every conceivable effort to ensure that its tax return should duly reach the Tax and Customs Administration, with the latter being exonerated and the default surcharge being upheld.

The moral of this story? Arrange for your tax consultant to see to your tax returns and you’ll never be late again!