As you all know, BeCA has been working on the VAT file for more than 20 years.

In short: because the Belgian state misimplemented a European law, pilot schools charged VAT on airline pilots’ training. As a consequence, pilot students had the legal opportunity to claim this VAT back from the schools. This legal loophole was closed in January 2014. As a BeCA member, if you still have bills from a Belgian TRTO dated before January 2014 and that are less than 10 years old: contact us, we may be able to help you!

In the beginning of 2017, our lawyer agreed with the Belgian Government that pilots would get reimbursed the VAT by the Belgian State. This deal was respected for 20 members during the summer of 2017. But then the payouts stopped. It took us some time to figure out what happened. First we were told that there was no budget approved, but in 2018 the payouts did not resume. Apparently the fiscal administration doesn’t agree with the view of the Ministry of Finance and refuses any further payouts. This leads to a discriminatory situation where some of our members were entitled to a payout and others not.

We thus had no other choice then to reactivate the frozen lawsuits against schools (we cannot sue directly the Belgian state, we must put the schools to court and they have to claim the money from the government). The first school we handled were OAC and BAFA. We won the case, but, for some reason, BAFA didn’t reclaim the money from the Belgian government. We therefore started an appeal procedure. The third school on the agenda is CAE, planned for May 2019.

Meanwhile, since some people shifted position in the political landscape (Belgian Government in current affairs), we have again a contact at the Ministry of Finance. We are re-explaining the case to the people in charge and hope they will tackle the issues and reactivate the payouts as agreed upon in 2017. But we keep the court cases active until further notice.

In parallel, we are also working on a solution via another court to get the Belgian Government directly involved in all court cases against the schools. That way we do not have to start an appeal procedure if one of the schools ‘forgets’ to reclaim the money from the Belgian State – we are not aiming to damage schools.

We were also informed that other parties are putting pressure via political channels to get this file correctly handled by the Belgian Government. Meaning: come clean, stop delaying all the procedures and start the payouts again. Of course we welcome all help on this one.

Stay tuned for more updates. This file is one big marathon, but we at BeCA are convinced we have a good chance to make it to the finish line!