Having read Glenn’s article from Dec 2020 re: VAT post Brexit, I wasn’t expecting ‘Big’ names to be charging us EU VAT on their services as it’s B2B.
However McAfee, Recurpost and GoDaddy have all charged us Vat in the April to June Qtr when their renewals have come in. Two quoting an EU VAT Number and the other an IE VAT number.
All three are saying that they’re right and we can reclaim it. Everything I’m reading says they’re wrong and that we can’t.
I’d welcome thoughts or advice.
Many thanks
Do they have your VAT number? Where are they based, i.e. what’s the address on their invoices? I would expect overseas service businesses who have a customer’s VAT number should be invoicing under the reverse charge. Many, however, still charge VAT if they don’t have proof you are a business.
Many thanks for coming back to me.
We’re an LLP so I suspect it’s confused them, not uncommon; people are fine with Ltd but LLP is often an issue…
The problem with them being ‘big’ is you only get to a call centre agent with a script for the usual questions/queries. Mine never are! Unfortunately they don’t usually have a person/team to pass you onto if it’s not covered by their script - UK companies are as bad…
They all claim to know we’re a business but ‘don’t have access to see if they have our VAT number’. I’ll persevere and make sure that they do. Hopefully by next year I’ll have cracked that one and they’ll better understand what they should be doing!
In the meantime, I’ve changed the way we’ve accounted for these invoices to ‘outside the scope of UK Vat’ and excluded them from the return. Fortunately it’s not big sums involved.
I’m not sure that’s the correct approach as they are not “outside the scope”. It’s still taxable, and should be accounted for under the reverse charge. The difference is that you are paying the VAT and are not able to reclaim it. In the same circumstances I have included it as reverse charge in the past at the full amount. The net effect to you is nil but HMRC shouldn’t have a problem with it.