VAT & Late Appeals
The Upper Tribunal's decision in Bharat Patel v HMRC (2026) is a further illustration of how procedural failure to engage with HMRC assessments at the right time can leave a taxpayer with no viable route to challenge.
HMRC raised VAT assessments against Mr Patel covering a period of several years. Mr Patel did not appeal within the statutory 30-day window. When he eventually sought to bring late appeals, the First-tier Tribunal refused permission, and the Upper Tribunal upheld that refusal.
The delay was found to be serious and significant. The reasons offered for it were considered weak, with the Tribunal taking the view that the assessment notices had in all likelihood been received. Later non-engagement by the taxpayer was treated as relevant to the overall picture rather than as a neutral factor.
Mr Patel's principal argument on the merits was that HMRC's assessments had themselves been issued outside the statutory time limits - the rules that restrict when HMRC may raise a VAT assessment by reference to when sufficient evidence of the facts came to their knowledge. That is not an insignificant argument where it can be properly evidenced, and it remains available in principle to any taxpayer facing assessments that appear to have been issued late.
The difficulty for Mr Patel was that the Tribunal was not required to conduct a detailed examination of that argument at the permission stage. It needed only to form a general impression of whether the underlying case was obviously very strong or obviously very weak. On the material available, it was not satisfied the case met that threshold. The statutory time limit point was therefore not enough, on its own, to rescue an otherwise inadequately explained late appeal.
The decision reinforces a consistent theme in VAT procedure: the 30-day appeal window is not a formality. Where a VAT assessment is received and considered wrong - whether on the figures, the basis of assessment, or the timing of HMRC's own actions - the response must be prompt. Allowing the window to pass, even where there may be a substantive point worth arguing, places the taxpayer in a position that is very difficult to recover.
