Ehtisham Ahmad, adviser in the office of the Prime Minister of the UAE has said that a GCC-wide implementation of value-added tax (VAT) could be delayed to mid-2013 as administrations are unprepared for such a shift and an official decision is yet to be taken, Gulf News has reported. 'The problem of trying to get an integrated VAT by 2012 when the free trade agreements kick in, is going to be very tight,' said Ahmad, who is also a senior fellow at the Centre of Economic Research at the University of Bonn and at the Asia Research Centre of the London School of Economics.