Devon-based Truprint has won its three-year legal case with HM
Revenue & Customs on whether it should have been charged VAT on
sales of photobooks. Truprint claimed that the tax was
incorrectly applied as the items were classified as “photo
albums” rather than zero-rated books. In a statement, Mark
Peters, a director at Truprint’s accountancy firm Old Mill, said
“HMRC’s case was based on an argument that photobooks were
not books because they often had no content, only
pictures.”
VAT tribunal judge Roger Berner sided with the direct marketer
and dismissed the claims. He ordered HMRC to repay £545,800
to Harrier Truprint to cover the tax years 2006 to 2009.
“This case has been a long and hard battle, but a very
significant one,” Peters continued, “because the law
was unclear about whether a photobook was a book, there was
inconsistency in the industry and while Harrier Truprint were
paying 20 percent VAT on the sale of their photobooks, many of
their competitors were not.”
Harrier Truprint’s finance director Graham Clark, added that now
the case is over, the company can “significantly expand our
book production business in 2012”, both in photobooks and
in commercial book printing. This is “likely to create
additional jobs in the future and enable us to become a major
player in the photobook industry on a regional, national and
international scale”.
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