A customer never paid their invoice — can I get back the VAT I already paid the FTA?

When you issue an invoice and pay the output VAT on it to the Federal Tax Authority, and the customer then genuinely fails to pay, the law lets you adjust — effectively recover — that VAT through what's called bad debt relief. The first condition is timing: more than six months must have passed since the invoice date, and you need to have actually attempted to collect the debt during that period, not simply let it sit. The second condition is that the amount must be genuinely written off in your accounting records — if you only write off part of the debt, you only recover the VAT on that written-off portion, not the full invoice.

The condition most businesses forget is formal notification: you must notify the customer of the amount written off — by letter, email, or post — including the invoice number, date, and amount, with no requirement that they acknowledge or respond, but you do need evidence the notice was sent. The adjustment itself is recorded in the adjustments column of Box 1 on the VAT return, split by emirate where relevant. RASEEKH tracks aging debts with clients so a legitimate recovery isn't lost to a missed deadline or a missing document.