Abuse principle blocks VAT corrections without revenue-safe unwind

A 2026-11-06 clarificationSkatteverket headed »Exempel om missbruksprincipen har utvecklats« adds a new condition to the abuse-of-law exampleSkatteverket: an input-tax correction at the recipient counts only where correction is actually and really possible without risk of tax lossSkatteverketSkatteverket.

The abuse principle — missbruksprincipen — means individuals cannot invoke EU law in a way that amounts to tax evasion or abuse. National authorities and courts may then deny a right that follows from the VAT Directive, whichever VAT right the evasion touches, as the Court of Justice held in the Schoenimport Italmoda cases. A taxable person who deliberately took part in VAT fraud and endangered the common VAT system cannot fall back on proportionality, neutrality, legal certainty or legitimate expectations either. Under the Supreme Administrative Court's assessment the principle applies as the Court of Justice framed it for fraud cases, without depending on any national implementation.

The new passage applies that principle to corrections. The national rules giving the right to correct wrongly charged VAT by issuing a credit invoice — an ändringsfaktura — cannot be used where the issuer did not act in good faith but together with the recipient created a scheme amounting to tax evasionSkatteverket. That bar applies on one condition: that the matching correction of input tax at the recipient is not possibleSkatteverket. And such a correction counts as possible only where there is an actual and real possibility of correcting the previously deducted tax at the recipient without any risk of tax lossSkatteverket. What that demands in practice is judged on the circumstances of the individual case. The principle can similarly reach the right to apply an exemption from tax liability, as in EN.SA and the R case.

The clarification sits beside the neighbouring prohibition on procedural abuse. Where transactions are constructed to obtain a tax advantage contrary to the provisions' purpose and that advantage is their main objective, they are redefined and taxed as if never made, following Halifax and Cussens — but that doctrine does not cover transactions forming part of tax fraud, where the abuse principle is the likely instrument instead, for example in carousel trading.

The good-faith thread runs through the invoicing rules. Member States must provide a way to correct wrongly invoiced tax where the issuer shows good faith, following Terracult and Schmeink & Cofreth, because the rule making wrongly stated VAT payable exists to remove the revenue risk that deduction rights can create. The effect is practical: without an actual, revenue-safe route to unwind the recipient's deduction, the issuer cannot use a credit invoice to wash out a collusive schemeSkatteverket.

For advisers, the test in a correction case with any bad-faith or collusive element is now twofold and sequentialSkatteverket: first, whether the issuer and recipient jointly built an evasion schemeSkatteverket, and second, whether the recipient's deducted tax can actually and really be corrected without risk of tax lossSkatteverket — answered case by case, not as a general rule.

Legal basis: the abuse-of-law principle in EU VAT case law with Skatteverket's good-faith and correction conditions, set out in the Rättslig vägledning on legal principles and on credit invoices.