FTA public clarifications and tax guides

The orthodox position in UAE tax practice is well known. A private clarification binds the Federal Tax Authority on the same facts and for the same applicant. A public clarification does not. A tax guide does not. That understanding rests on the FTA’s own published framework and, at the level of formal classification, it is difficult to dispute. The Authority has expressly reserved binding force to particular instruments and has withheld that label from others.

Yet that formal classification does not answer the real question. The true issue is not whether a public clarification or a guide is binding in exactly the same technical sense as a private clarification. The real issue is whether the FTA may, consistently with the rule of law, legal certainty, equal treatment and basic standards of coherent administration, depart from its own published interpretation in a materially identical case without a principled justification. Once the question is framed in those terms, the conventional answer becomes much less satisfactory. A public clarification or a guide may fail to qualify as binding law, but it does not follow that the Authority is free to disregard it as though it were of no normative consequence.