Upper Tribunal Tax and Chancery Chamber

UT (Tax & Chancery) UT/2023/00099 - [2025] UKUT 00013 (TCC)

Fecha: 22-Oct-2024

The substantive appeal

The substantive appeal

120.

Mr Brown said in his skeleton argument that the Appellant would seek to rely on the thousands of VAT invoices which it holds, even were it to lose this appeal. However, he did not press this point at the hearing, and he was right not to do so. That is because we have decided as follows:

(1)

The Appellant’s Grounds did not include a ground which stated that it was relying on the fact that it held the invoices to support its input tax claims.

(2)

The FTT’s jurisdiction when hearing the substantive appeal is supervisory, so the FTT can only consider whether Officer Mills’ decision was reasonable.

(3)

In exercising that jurisdiction, the only facts which can be considered by the FTT are those which were before Officer Mills at that time he made the decision.

121.

Since the invoices were not provided to Officer Mills, the FTT cannot make findings of fact about them, and they therefore cannot form part of the evidence at the substantive hearing. The Appellant can only rely on evidence that was before Officer Mills when he made his decision. As the FTT said at [2], the invoices are “not relevant to the issues that the Tribunal must determine”. Therefore, there was no error in the FTT’s conclusion at [49] that the asserted invoices are not admissible on the appeal to the FTT.