Measures to ensure the correct collection of VAT EU VAT case law

3 cases of the Court of Justice and the General Court of the European Union on this point of VAT law, from 2022 to 2025.

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Article 273 of Directive 2006/112/EC Obligations of taxable persons and certain non-taxable persons · 3 of these cases

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Under each case, what the Court decided, from its summary. The summaries are AI-generated and are not official documents: open the case for the Court’s own text.

C-278/24 Genzyński

Judgment · 30 April 2025 · Poland

Joint and several liability of company directors for VAT arrears

They do not preclude such a system, provided liability is confined to arrears arising during the director's term and to amounts unrecovered from the company, and provided the director can genuinely rebut the presumption by showing he exercised all due diligence in managing the company's affairs. The escape route must not be merely theoretical. But the mere fact that the exchequer was the company's sole creditor when permanent insolvency arose is not by itself a defence. Confirms Member States may attach personal VAT liability to directors on a rebuttable presumption of knowledge and influence, without proof of fraud or bad faith, following Herdijk.

C-277/24 Adjak

Judgment · 27 February 2025 · Poland

Directors' joint and several liability and the rights of the defence

Exclusion of the potentially liable director from the company's assessment proceedings is permissible. At that stage liability is only a possibility, and participation could compromise confidentiality and delay collection. But the exclusion is lawful only if, in the subsequent joint and several liability proceedings, the director can effectively challenge the findings of fact and legal classifications made in the assessment proceedings and can access the tax authority's file, subject to the rights of others. Member States may keep assessment and derivative liability in separate tracks, but the second track must be a genuine opportunity to reopen the quantum and characterisation of the debt, not merely to test the statutory conditions of liability.

C-1/21 Direktor na Direktsia Obzhalvane i danachno-osiguritelna praktika

Judgment · 13 October 2022 · Bulgaria

Joint and several liability of a company director for the company's VAT debts

Article 273 and proportionality do not preclude such liability where the person is a manager or member of an executive body, acted in bad faith in making hidden distributions or transferring assets free of charge or below market value, there is a causal link with the company's inability to pay VAT, liability is capped at the depletion of assets, and it arises only subsidiarily after recovery from the company fails. Default interest may be included, but only interest attributable to the bad faith acts. Article 205 does not apply. The PFI Convention does not either. Relevant to advisers on directors' personal exposure for corporate VAT arrears in Bulgaria and other Member States with similar derivative liability rules outside Article 205.