CJEU - Recent Developments in Value Added Tax 2022

1. Introduction

Value Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on final consumption that is collected in the European Union through a system for which the taxable person collects the tax from their customers on behalf of the state. The public treasury should obtain the right VAT revenue from this system according to the law that is no less but also no more revenue than what the VAT law allows.

As the VAT rules are not always crystal clear to understand, in some cases, the taxpayer collects an excess of VAT and pays it to the tax authorities. Without exhausting the situations when this unduly payment of VAT may arise, frequent examples are the application of the “normal rules” in cases of transactions exempted of VAT or subject to reduced VAT rates or when the place of taxation is not the Member State where the VAT has been paid.

The CJEU has decided some cases during recent years for which the VAT had been unduly paid in excess to the tax authorities.For the purpose of this chapter, the author will refer to them as “VAT unduly paid”.

From those ECJ rulings, a set of certain procedural guidelines can be extracted that are summarized as follows.

S. 258First, and taking into account what Art 203 of the VAT Dire...