Minister Koolmees has amended the rules governing the withdrawal of NOW applications. Applications for the third tranche of NOW must, if desired, be withdrawn by 15 February 2021.
NOW
The Emergency Measure for Job Retention (NOW) helps businesses affected by the coronavirus crisis with their wage costs. The third tranche of the NOW covers the subsidy period for October, November and December 2020.
Applications for this tranche of the NOW scheme had to be submitted by 27 December 2020 at the latest. Applications for the fourth tranche of the NOW scheme can be submitted to the UWV from 15 February 2021 (until 14 March 2021).
Withdraw application
It is possible to withdraw a NOW application. The advantage of withdrawing the application for the third tranche may be that the turnover period can then be chosen again for the fourth tranche.
However, this applies to the fourth tranche only if the application for the third tranche before 15 February 2021 has been withdrawn. Any requests for withdrawal submitted at a later date will be rejected by the UWV.
The turnover period is the three-month period during which turnover is compared with one quarter of the annual turnover in 2019. If this reveals a loss of turnover of at least 20%, an application can be made for the NOW grant. The amount of the grant depends on the extent of the loss of turnover.
Whether it is worth withdrawing an application for a NOW grant is a matter of doing the maths. But it also partly depends on how the crisis is likely to unfold.
No grant
The consequence of withdrawing the NOW application is, of course, that any advance payment received must be repaid in full.
Business owners who, at any point, wish to withdraw their application for the NOW subsidy but have not withdrawn it in time may:
- in their application for the grant to be determined, request that it be set at zero;
- do not submit a request for determination (in which case the grant will ultimately be set at zero).
In both cases, the business owner is not required to obtain an auditor’s report or a third-party statement. However, the turnover period for the next tranche of the NOW must still correspond to the tranche for which the subsidy has been set at zero.