See also the words of the respondent's counsel in the hearing of June 4, 2025: "So okay, obviously, then the position was accepted that there are transactions on which zero tax should not have been paid, and some of them are...(p. 12, paras. 16-18 of the minutes of the hearing of June 4, 2025).
- According to the Respondent, the Appellant cannot pay input tax on the one hand, and on the other hand claim that this is a transaction that is taxable at a zero rate. However, I am of the opinion that there is a basis for the appellant's claim that she was indifferent to the very payment of tax to the service provider, and that she paid the input tax even though she thought that the transaction was taxable at zero. When the appellant pays the transaction tax to the medical service provider and immediately deducts it as inputs, even if she believes that the issuer of the invoice is wrong, she has no special economic interest in starting a long process of contacting the service provider, who may even not accept her position. The appellant even claimed, in some contradiction to the aforesaid, that she had approached the service providers with a request to amend the invoice (but apart from a mere claim, she did not prove this and the appellant's representative did not even know what the results of the inquiries were, p. 25, paras. 1-29 of the minutes of the evidentiary hearing).
- Therefore, in light of the respondent's reliance on that "presumption", I debated whether there was room to return the proceeding to the assessment stage, in which the respondent would examine the transactions on their merits. However, I did not see fit to do so.
- This is because the appellant, who has the burden of proving to the respondent that the conditions for applying zero-rate tax (Regulation 12 of the Value Added Tax Regulations, 5736-1976), had the opportunity to prove to the court and the respondent that the transactions themselves meet the conditions of section 30(a)(8)(g) of the Law, but it did not even attempt to do so.
- Also in the amended decision in the objection, in paragraph 22, the respondent detailed the starting point for its calculation and the appellant's arguments against it: "The hospital, which provides the medical service to the patient, issued invoices that included tax at the full rate, a fact that shows that these services, in his view, were not part of a 'hospitalization' (otherwise, the hospital would have issued tax invoices that included tax at a zero rate, as the hospital did in other cases). I will note that the company demanded the input tax that was included in these tax invoices. If the company believed that the tax invoices issued by the hospital were improper, it should have said so in real time, and not now, years later... After the company demanded the input tax that was included in these invoices... - it is silenced from claiming that the invoices issued by the hospital, as it claims, are improper."
See also the words of the appellant's counsel in the pre-trial hearing: "This is my lady, I emphasize, not the formula but what is included in each of the components of the formula, here is our dispute" (p. 7, paras. 33-34 of the minutes of the pre-trial hearing).