Yesterday I needed to submit my 1st quarter VAT report. I haven’t had issues before but yesterday the VAT Submission failed with the error:
By ChRIS : The VAT Period you have entered 2020-06 for the VRN ********** (hidden) was not found, please check and resubmit if necessary.<
I triple checked my dates (on QF and also on HMRC Gateway) and they are correct 1/4/2020-30/06/2020 - the only difference is that I checked the box to de-register for VAT as Coronavirus has killed my company dead! Yesterday was my last official trading day although I haven’t done any trade since March lock-down.
I called HMRC VAT help line and they said that they could see I had tried 3 times to submit my return electronically but I needed to talk to Quickfile about it. So here I am…
Is there an issue?
I have now not only checked it a dozen times but have had my wife check it too and everything is correct. My last submission was this morning at 08:00 and that also was rejected with the same message.
Yes my VAT quarters are March, June, Sept, December. I put the dates in exactly as I did last year. I have logged in to the HMRC Gateway and checked theses dates and they are correct. But HMRC say that I need to speak to Quickfile?
No I haven’t deregistered with HMRC directly. I’ve spoken to their helpdesk and they say that my dayes are correct and that it’s a problem with my accounting package?
If you’ve ticked the “deregister” option in QuickFile, you will need to deregister with HMRC directly beforehand. This is likely to be what’s causing the error, even though it mentions the wrong period.
If we are sending a final VAT return and HMRC aren’t expecting it, they will just return an error.
Okay that is now understood but you have to admit that just having a checkbox there with ‘de-register for VAT’ on it is rather ambiguous to the uninitiated.
I logged on to my HMRC Gateway and manually submitted my VAT return which took me 10 minutes. However I had spent 5 hours trying to sort out the issue during which time I tried to submit the failed ‘return’ 6 times!
I have also now gone through the process of ‘De-registering’ for VAT and also marked the company up as ‘ceased trading’.
Thank you for your assistance during this most difficult, frustrating and for me, emotionally charged, episode.
No problem at all - glad to hear you managed to sort this.
As you can see yourself, even though the issue related to that “deregister” option, the HMRC error related to the period itself which adds to the confusion.
