The Challenge
"I just found out my bookkeeper under-reported output VAT for two quarters. Before I go anywhere near the FTA portal, I need to know what fixing this is actually going to cost me — in penalties and in fees."
A Dubai trading company’s new finance manager discovered the error during a routine reconciliation, well before any FTA audit notice arrived. The owner’s instinct was to stay quiet and hope it went unnoticed, but that is the single costliest choice available under UAE VAT law.
Our Approach
- Two separate cost buckets — every fix has an FTA penalty component (fixed plus a percentage of the unpaid tax, capped at 300%) and a separate professional fee for the review and correction work.
- Voluntary Disclosure cuts the FTA side sharply — disclosing the error yourself via a VAT301/VD before the FTA finds it attracts materially lower penalties than the FTA discovering it in an audit, and stops the percentage-based charge from growing further.
- Our fee scales with the mess, not the mistake — a single-period correction with clean records is a modest fixed fee; multi-year exposure across several tax periods, or a full re-reconciliation of input and output VAT, costs more because it takes longer to verify.
- We quantify both numbers upfront — before filing anything, we calculate the exact tax difference, estimate the FTA penalty range under current rules, and quote our fee, so the client is never filing blind and never surprised afterwards.
Our review starts with reconstructing the correct VAT position for each affected period, confirms whether disclosure crosses the FTA’s own thresholds for a formal Voluntary Disclosure versus a simple amendment, and files it through EmaraTax on the client’s behalf.
The Result
Handled this way, the business pays the unpaid tax plus a penalty that is a fraction of what an FTA-initiated audit would trigger, and the correction is closed out with a clear paper trail rather than an open compliance risk hanging over future filings; the total cost is almost always lower, and always more predictable, than doing nothing and waiting to be caught.
The Takeaway
"Fixing a UAE VAT filing mistake costs the unpaid tax, a reduced FTA penalty for voluntary disclosure, and a review fee scaled to the number of periods affected — all far cheaper than an FTA-led audit."
