Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Harlech on 14 December (HL3897), what proportion of VAT registration applications received in (1) June, (2) July, (3) August, and (4) September, had been dealt with by 30 November; and what were the equivalent figures in 2021.

The data requested is not straightforward to provide as HMRC do not report this data internally in the form requested. As such, the information cannot be provided within the timeframe without incurring disproportionate cost.

In July 2022 HMRC came under a significant attack from VAT registration fraudsters and we saw the number of registrations being sent to HMRC increase to unprecedented levels.

To deal with this issue a number of measures were urgently put in place to protect genuine customers and to stop the increase in fraudulent activity. These measures entailed additional security checks that meant that some genuine customers were caught in the new processes to ensure the authenticity of the registration being made. HMRC does understand the frustrations from agents and businesses, and are working to ensure all genuine registrations are processed as quickly as possible.

HMRC aims to turnaround most VAT registrations within 40 working days and is currently meeting that service level agreement, although some cases do take longer due to additional compliance checks or complexity.

Due to the high numbers of new registrations being submitted to HMRC during the summer, HMRC did not always meet the service standard over that time period.