There have been two conflicting tribunal decisions on the recovery of overpaid VAT where a company either later joined or left a VAT group. Nick Skerrett and Gary Barnett analyse the decisions in Standard Chartered and MG Rover Group
It is a trite proposition that two differently constituted courts when faced with the same issue might arrive at different conclusions. There cannot however be many more stark examples than the conflicting decisions of the First-tier Tribunal in Standard Chartered PLC v HMRC [2014] UKFTT 316 and MG Rover Group Ltd v HMRC [2014] UKFTT 327.
Both decisions released on the same day grappled with the ‘thorny’ issue of how the fiction created by the UK’s VAT grouping rules impacts on the entitlement of companies within a VAT group to reclaim overpaid VAT once...
