VAT treatment of land and buildings

Atopic that many students taking the Association of Taxation Technicians paper 6 struggle with is VAT on land and buildings. This is not surprising nor are these struggles confined to students. Land and buildings is an area in which more or less every tricky part of VAT has the potential to converge neatly – or not so neatly – at the same time. These big hitting VAT issues include but are not limited to VAT liability partial exemption the capital goods scheme and business or non-business considerations.

It is impossible to cover all of these complexities in a single short article. Instead I will focus on the liability of supplies related to land and buildings. This will include a walk through the implications of some classic liability scenarios which regularly crop up in the VAT and property world. The article does not discuss...