The contract may be regarded as an invoice
On 29 September 2022, a judgment was handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the Raiffeisen Leasing case, C-235/21, with the general conclusion that the contract itself can potentially be regarded as an invoice and gives the right to deduct VAT. Thus, it turned out that according to the CJEU, the form of the document itself is not that important - writes Łukasz Woźniak, manager at Thedy & Partners, in Rzeczpospolita.
At the same time, the CJEU conditionally indicated that it is for the national court to assess, in the context of the provisions of the agreement, whether it actually contains the information that is necessary in the present case for the tax authority to determine whether the material prerequisites for the right to deduct VAT have been met. It is worth noting that the contract indicated the amount of VAT but did not specify the rate of that tax and it is again for the referring court to examine, in the view of the CJEU, whether that rate could nevertheless be derived from the contract.
In my opinion, such a position of the court may lead to a number of misunderstandings, both due to the overinterpretation of the judgment by tax authorities and by taxpayers themselves.
The entire article was published in Rzeczpospolita of 2 November 2022, p. H2