The Seven-Year Record Retention Rule for UAE Corporate Tax

The start point is the end of the tax period, not the filing date and not the payment date. A December year-end company's 2025 period ends 31 December 2025, so its records must be kept until 31 December 2032, even though the return was filed in September 2026. Short periods follow the same rule from their own end dates.

The per-period clock means the archive is a rolling seven-year window, not a single date. At any point the business holds up to seven or eight periods' files, with the oldest expiring each year. Manage this with a retention schedule per period: period end date, destruction-eligible date, and the file location. Destroying a period's file even a month early is a breach if the FTA asks for it.

Everything that supports the return for the period: the financial statements, books of account, source documents, tax computation and schedules, relief and election evidence, transfer pricing documentation, and the submission and payment proofs. The test is re-performance: with these records, a reviewer should be able to rebuild the filed return.

Particular attention to records that age badly: electronic systems that get replaced, email archives on departed employees' accounts, and adviser files held externally. A system migration that drops historic transaction detail can silently destroy the records for open periods. Plan migrations with retention in mind, exporting and archiving the old system's data before decommissioning it.

One file per period, complete and indexed, stored securely with backups. Review the archive annually: confirm each closed period's file is complete, confirm backups restore, and confirm access survives staff changes. Where advisers hold parts of the file, keep a register of what is held where, and retrieve copies centrally.

For dissolved companies, designate the archive holder in the dissolution papers: typically the former directors, the liquidator or the advisers, with the location recorded. For groups, decide whether the archive is central or per entity, and ensure each entity's file is complete on its own. Seven years is a long time; the archive must outlast the people who created it.

Groups face the archiving question at scale: dozens of entities, each with seven-year rolling files, advisers holding parts of the records, and systems changing across the group. The answer is a group archiving policy: what is kept, where, in what form, by whom, with a central register of every entity's files and their locations. The policy should survive the departure of the group tax manager, which means it must be written, not tribal knowledge.

Centralise where possible: a group tax archive holding each entity's period files, indexed and backed up, with access controls. Where local law or commercial reality requires local archiving, the central register still records what is held where. Test the archive annually with a retrieval exercise across a sample of entities; a policy that is not tested is a policy that fails when needed.