When does the reverse charge apply?

It is a strange quirk of working in tax that a topic can sit and fester in the wilderness for many years without rearing its head and then it suddenly seems to crop up everywhere. As Oscar Wilde might say: ‘Sometimes we can spend years without living at all and suddenly our whole life is concentrated in a single moment.’

A case in point is the ‘reverse charge’ in the world of VAT which in 2021 has been extended to three different situations. The latest extension was the new domestic reverse charge (DRC) for the construction industry which took effect on 1 March and has been the subject of my last two VAT articles for Taxation (Reverse charge – take three (21 January 2021); Countdown for builders (25 February 2021)). The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the many different...