Submitting a FINAL VAT Return and EC Sales List upon deregistration

[Euroexpress24]

Our company has deregistered from VAT effective 30/06, which is also the closing day of the last reporting period.
HMRC rejects the final submission with the error message:
“The VAT Period you have entered 2015-06 for the VRN xxxxxxxxx was not found, please check and resubmit if necessary.”.
We had to submit manually using the Government gateway. It does expect a report marked “FINAL”, which may be the reason the usual report was rejected.

An EC Sales List also needs to be submitted, which is not possible, due to Error status of VAT return.

Any advise would be appreciated.

Thank!
Michael

[Glenn]

The EC Sales list only becomes available when the original VAT return is filed electronically via QuickFile, as far as I know.

Were you able to commit the VAT return to QuickFile without submitting to HMRC? If so we may be able to pull out the ECSL figures for you.

[Euroexpress24]

Thanks, Glenn! The VAT report is stored in Quickfile (with an “ERROR” status). It has been successfully submitted to HMRC via the Gov Gateway.
If you could “unblock” the EC Sales List for submission, that would be great! Thanks! Michael

[Glenn]

It should now be accessible as I’ve manually marked the return as filed. If you now go into that return you will see an EC Sales list button.

Please check all the figures on the ECSL carefully before submitting.

Thanks!

[Euroexpress24]

Very good, that solved the problem. I’ve also used the “Default indicator” setting for the EC Sales List. Very handy when submitting 45 line items! Thanks!

[Sameera]

Once you deregister for vat HMRC will give you a specific date for the final return. If they have given you 30th June as final date then I am surprised you could not submit it via quickfile. I remember from previous discussion that quickfile dates are flexible to change I.e before we could only select the vat quarters (I have not tested this change yet though).

I am interested in this because time to time we do get clients who deregister and it will be good to know what went wrong and where.

Thanks

[Euroexpress24]

Hi Sameera, thanks for following up on this. I guess what might have gone wrong is that HMRC expected a return marked “FINAL” (this is how it was displayed on their website, where I submitted the VAT return manually), but was offered a submission marked “2015-06” by Quickfile instead, which was not a valid period anymore, because of deregistration. Hence the error message “The VAT Period you have entered 2015-06 for the VRN xxxxxxxxx was not found”. Probably the best is to contact the HMRC technical team for clarification on expected formats for FINAL VAT return.