Deferring Vat de-registration

[TeeRev]

A quick question for the experts on here before I ask our accountants tomorrow.

My wife informed the HMRC that we would like to de-register our business for Vat at the end of December and they sent her confirmation of that.

Unfortunately it's turned out that we have had a lot of unexpected motor expenditure in January which has close to £1000 of Vat on it, I'm wondering whether we can either defer de-registration for another quarter to enable us to reclaim it or add those January invoices into our end of December return and reclaim it that way.

[Eric Mc]

When you de-register, HMRC expects you to make a final "mopping up" type VAT return and that could be used to make any final legitimate Input VAT reclaims.

If you de-register just before you make a big VAT reclaim, you might have to repay some, if not all, of the VAT anyway.

[TeeRev]

Spoke to the accountant and this vat return is the final mopping up one so no chance of claiming the January vat back, we've just got to suck it up, shame as we've caught up on doing all our final invoicing and we're paying them about 2.6k so that would have got it down a bit.

On the up side though, we've now finished the Penthouse self build and will be reclaiming nearly 30k vat on that and we are finally retired from actual business. The company will remain in existence as it still has a large tax loss and it's owed quite a lot of money by our property company which will be paid over the next few years. We will then be drawing that out against our directors loan account so it's a win, win for us.

[Eric Mc]

There is a very extended time limit for the final VAT return. It is not the same as a regular quarterly return.