Companies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia have given a vote of confidence to the implementation of VAT with 65 per cent of them having successfully filed their first VAT returns by April 2018.

According to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (Acca) and Thomson Reuters’ VAT Return Filing and Compliance survey conducted in April, only 18 per cent of companies had found filing their first VAT returns “challenging” and eight per cent “very challenging”.

Pierre Arman, market development leader for tax and accounting at Thomson Reuters, said that at the time of the survey in April, a lot of companies’ first VAT return deadline had been pushed by the Federal Tax Authority by one or two months, hence, about a third of firms did not file a VAT return at the time.