Thursday January 26, 2012 at 9:00am
January can be a gloomy month – not least for those facing the deadline for completing their online tax return – but January 2012 has brought at least a small ray of sunshine for small businesses which feel unfairly treated by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
In a precedent-setting judgement, the Tax Tribunal has ruled the Government is acting illegally by issuing late-payment penalty fines against thousands of small businesses which fail to submit their tax returns on time....
Thursday January 5, 2012 at 9:00am
I do think HMRC might be over-egging it a bit when it comes to tax enquiries at the moment. It’s been reported that HMRC recovered £179 million as a result of enquiries into tax returns in one year alone.
Over recent years HMRC have become more and more determined to discover tax discrepancies. There’s nothing wrong with that in my view, if they are tackling people who are making false claims or trying to fiddle the system. But unfortunately it also means than many innocent b....
Thursday September 29, 2011 at 9:30am
There seems to be a never ending stream of initiatives from HMRC relating to how they handle tax enquiries where (rightly or wrongly) they consider that something needs explaining. Now HMRC’s procedures are being streamlined with the aim of reducing the time an enquiry takes.
Specifically there will now be 4 levels of enquiry under the Single Compliance Process (SCP). At what they call level 1 they are reducing the time taken to just 1.5 days. That’s for very simple enquiries wher....