I got hit with a tax penalty — can I actually request a waiver or reduction?

Cabinet Decision No. 105 of 2021 empowers the FTA to review requests for waiver or installment of administrative penalties, submitted directly through the EmaraTax dashboard under the Penalty Waiver or Penalty Installment Plan tabs. Grounds typically accepted include: a general fault in the FTA's own systems, payment gateways, or telecommunications that caused the non-compliance; a genuinely exceptional circumstance beyond your control — a medical emergency or a disaster, not simple negligence — that prevented you from complying; an error by the FTA itself in calculating or applying the penalty to the wrong period; or you corrected the violation yourself, such as through a voluntary disclosure, before the FTA discovered it. For an installment plan specifically, the penalty must be at least AED 50,000, remain unsettled, not be under dispute before the Tax Disputes Resolution Committee or the courts (except via a reconsideration request), and you must not owe any other payable tax for that period.

Every request needs an undertaking to settle the amount per any agreed installment plan, an undertaking that the violation has been corrected and won't recur, plus any further documents the committee asks for. The FTA takes its time reviewing these — the official service page states a maximum of 110 business days from receiving a complete application, and the service itself is free. If a request is rejected, a reconsideration request and then the Tax Disputes Resolution Committee remain open as next steps. RASEEKH helps clients build the request on solid grounds the first time, so a preventable rejection doesn't cost them months.