Right to good administration EU VAT case law

4 cases of the Court of Justice and the General Court of the European Union on this point of VAT law, from 2017 to 2025.

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Provisions these cases interpret most

Article 273 of Directive 2006/112/EC Obligations of taxable persons and certain non-taxable persons · 3 of these cases
Article 167 of Directive 2006/112/EC Origin and scope of right of deduction · 1 of these cases
Article 168 of Directive 2006/112/EC Origin and scope of right of deduction · 1 of these cases
Article 250 of Directive 2006/112/EC Returns · 1 of these cases
Article 2 of Directive 2006/112/EC Subject matter and scope · 1 of these cases
Article 213 of Directive 2006/112/EC Identification · 1 of these cases
Article 242 of Directive 2006/112/EC General obligations · 1 of these cases
Article 22 of Sixth Directive 77/388/EEC Obligations of persons liable for payment · 1 of these cases

The 4 cases, most recent first

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-582/20 SC Cridar Cons

Judgment · 24 February 2022 · Romania

Suspension of a tax appeal pending criminal proceedings

No preclusion, subject to three conditions: the suspension must not push the complaint beyond a reasonable time. The suspension decision must state its reasons in fact and law and be open to judicial review, and, if the refusal turns out to breach EU law, the taxable person must be repaid within a reasonable time with default interest where appropriate. Suspension of enforcement need not be automatic, but must be available where there is serious doubt as to lawfulness and serious, irreparable harm would otherwise result. Confirms that tax authorities may pause appeal proceedings to await criminal evidence, but fences the practice.

C-298/16 Ispas

Judgment · 9 November 2017

Access to the inspection file in a VAT assessment, and what has to be handed over

The Court held that the general principle of respect for the rights of the defence requires that, in such national procedures, an individual is to have the opportunity to have communicated to him, at his request, the information and documents in the administrative file which were considered by the public authority when it adopted its decision, unless objectives of public interest warrant restricting access to that information and those documents. The obligation is therefore triggered by a request, it extends to the material actually relied on in adopting the decision rather than to the file as a whole, and it is qualified by public interest objectives which the national court is to weigh. The ruling settles the shape of the right in a VAT inspection along three lines at once: it is exercised on request rather than conferred automatically, it covers the material the authority considered in adopting the decision rather than everything gathered, and it yields to public interest objectives.