Turnover tax rebate

A business owner is entitled to being refunded for turnover tax on supplies and services the remuneration for which he or she has not, and will never, collect. The right to such a refund first comes about when it is established that (part of) the remuneration will not be collected. The law has dictated since the first of January 2017 that the right to refund is deemed to have formed on expiry of a maximum 12-month term of the date of exigibility of the underlying remuneration. This has been done to remove doubt: under the old regime the date of formation of the right to refund was deemed to have coincided with the date by which the business owner, more or less at his or her own discretion, could be said to have resigned him or herself within reason to the fact that the debtor in question would not be settling up the outstanding amount, with the proviso that the application for the turnover tax refund had to be submitted at the very latest as part of the tax return for the earliest period in which it would no longer have been possible start debt collection proceedings.

There are limits to the business owner’s discretion in establishing whether it may reasonably be assumed by him or her that the debtor is never going to pay up. This was confirmed by a ruling by the Bois-le-Duc Court of Appeal to the effect that a particular refund application filed in 2014 had missed the deadline, the established facts having borne out that it had become clear to the business owner in question well before 2014 that the amount he was owned was never going to be paid. The Court duly threw out the business owner’s claim on the grounds of inadmissibility owing to the business owner by deferring his tax refund application until 2014 having exceeded his discretion.

Dutch version: Teruggaaf omzetbelasting