Registration Obligation and Threshold
Statutory Basis: VAT Act §19, §31
What statute says
Value Added Tax Act, 2014 (as amended by the VAT (Amendment) (No. 2) Act, 2021), s. 19 (self-filing requirement) and s. 31 (turnover-based filing requirements) frame the registration obligation. A business must register once taxable supplies exceed the statutory threshold (currently BSD 100,000 in annual taxable supplies). The obligation is based on expected or actual taxable activity and applies even when a business is still building its internal bookkeeping process. Businesses that should be registered but delay registration can face back-dated liabilities, penalties, and filing exposure.
The legal expectation is not just obtaining a VAT number. A registered person must issue compliant records, account for output tax, and submit returns for each required period. In practice, registration is the entry point to ongoing compliance duties.
What platform does
CoralLedger Comply supports threshold-aware onboarding by capturing TIN, VAT number, filing frequency, and business profile settings during setup. The platform then links those profile values to filing workflows, return generation, and compliance score calculations.
The setup workflow also prepares downstream controls: transaction categorization, return period generation, and deadline tracking. If VAT registration details are incomplete, Comply surfaces this as a data quality gap so teams can close it before filing.
Customer responsibility
You remain responsible for deciding when the threshold is met, completing registration with the Department of Inland Revenue, and entering the correct registration data into Comply. You are also responsible for updating changes in business status (for example, registration effective date or filing frequency changes) as soon as they occur.