Late reverse-charge note cannot rescue failed triangulation

A triangular transaction lets three VAT-registered businesses in three Member States move goods directly from the first to the last while the intermediary in the middle avoids registering in the destination State: its intra-Community acquisition there is exempt and tax shifts to the final customer under reverse charge. The price of that simplification is paperwork. The intermediary's invoice must contain the words "Reverse charge"Europa — Article 226(11a) of the VAT Directive — and the Court of Justice held in Luxury Trust Automobil (C-247/21) that this wording is a substantive conditionEuropa: without it the final customer has not been validly designated as liableEuropa, and adding a triangular-transaction note later cannot correct the omissionEuropa.

The General Court's judgment of 7 October 2026 in F GmbH (T-773/25)Europa closes the remaining escape route. F, an Austrian intermediary, had declared supplies from 2011 to 2014 as intra-Community deliveries and issued invoices with no VAT and no statement of triangular treatment or transfer of liability. On audit the Austrian tax authority treated them as failed triangulations taxed under the ordinary chain rules, charging cumulative intra-Community acquisitions in Austria and refusing input-VAT deduction. In 2015 F reissued the invoices with the triangular wording and corrected its recapitulative statements, then claimed the adjustment in its March 2015 return. The tax court allowed the claim only with effect from 2015, with no retroactive effect for 2011–2014, and the tax authority appealed.

The General Court held that issuing, several years after supplies already invoiced without the "Autoliquidation" wording referred to in Article 226(11a), invoices containing that wording for the first time as required for the derogating triangulation regime does not trigger, for those supplies, the legal consequences of that administrative simplification regimeEuropa — so the VAT adjustment for those supplies cannot be declared for the current or a future tax periodEuropa. The wording of Article 42(a) sets no deadline, but context and purpose point the other way: the Article 41 liabilities and the identification, reporting and taxation duties in the destination State had already arisen and do not disappear retroactively, so the administrative simplification the regime exists to deliver can no longer be achieved afterwards. Years later the facts may also have changed — the final customer may have disappeared — putting correct taxation in the destination State at risk, and checking each transaction one by one for good faith would itself defeat the simplification. The wording requirement also exists so the customer knows it owes the tax; a note added years later is manifestly incompatible with that function. Fiscal neutrality does not rescue the claim either: the case law allowing correction of wrongly invoiced tax where the issuer acted in good faith concerns tax wrongly claimed, whereas here the tax had been correctly claimed by the authority.

For intermediaries the consequence is sharp. State "omvänd betalningsskyldighet" on the invoice from the startSkatteverket: issuing an invoice without that wording, then issuing a new invoice containing it afterwards, cannot make the buyer liable for the supply. Skatteverket's updated guidance states the holding in exactly those terms.

Legal basis: the General Court's judgment of 7 October 2026 in case T-773/25, Finanzamt für Großbetriebe v F GmbH, on Article 42(a) of Council Directive 2006/112/EC read with Article 197(1)(c) and Article 226(11a); the Court of Justice's judgment of 8 December 2022 in case C-247/21, Luxury Trust Automobil, on the substantive invoice condition; Skatteverket's updated guidance on trade with several parties within the EU, carrying the 2026-10-14 case-law entry on the reverse-charge wording in the intermediary's triangulation invoice.