Our tip comes from Karen Regan, Karen is a Chartered Tax Adviser and has been a member the CIPFA VAT Committee, and the CIPFA representative at HMRC’s Land and Property Liaison Group for over 10 years and now represents CTG on this group.

Karen’s tip is around the practicalities of filing the ‘option to tax paperwork’ with HMRC. Taxpayers are then required to email their notification to HMRC’s option to tax unit. When submitting the notification, most Taxpayers will usually complete form VAT1614A online, save it as a PDF, sign it and send it as an email attachment. The submitted email generates an automatic response from HMRC which provides evidence that HMRC received the option to tax notification and gives the date of the notification.

HMRC advise in Notice 742A, para 4.2.3, that the email subject line includes:

The address of the property, including any postcode
The effective date of the ‘option to tax notification
Our tip of the month is to also include the opter’s name and VAT registration number in the subject line. A copy of the notification may be required in the future to demonstrate that an option to tax has been made, in particular to satisfy a potential buyer or tenant that VAT is due on the transaction, therefore, sufficient detail of both the property and the opter should be shown in the subject line. It is also best practice to send the email from a generic email address, rather than from an individual, where the auto-response will be retained in the long-term. You may wish to copy in colleagues however, the auto-response will come only to the sender’s email address.