Employment Tax Expert

Tax investigations are taking a new, slightly sinister twist – HMRC are allegedly demanding personal financial records from business people, without proper grounds for suspicion.

This comes about at a time when Section CH223430 of HMRC’s Tax Investigation handbook appears to have “disappeared. Now I know you’ll be asking what the hell is this reference all about, well it tells inspectors that they need to find something significantly wrong, questionable or suspicious in a business’s record (ie they need to ‘break’ the record) before they can demand personal financial details from an owner or director of that business.

A number of people have noticed that this has become worryingly commonplace, Anne Eager, enquiries manager at RJP, stated:

“I have had requests for private bank records from my clients in opening letters. When I challenged the request, the inspector said that it was to save time, as he felt it was very likely there would be issues with the records.

He added it was a ‘standard approach’ under the new regime.”

In other words HMRC are indulging themselves in fishing trips into people’s private bank records. Once HMRC have access to those records every payment into the account would be under suspicion, and it would be for the taxpayer to prove that the payments in do not constitute taxable income. Innocent until proven guilty – not in the tax world!

and what you may ask has happened to Section CH223430 will return , HMRC claim it will return but why was it removed/dropped in the first place?

Anyone who has a debt with HMRC, whether it be from a Tax Investigation, employer compliance review, employment status review, PAYE/NIC/CIS or Self Assessment you need to take heed of what is happening regarding HMRC debt collection agents.

To begin with, those out in the field are now not allowed to contact HMRC offices to validate the debts that they are being asked to collect. Why you may ask, well there are two very different reasons:
1.The support teams back at base do not have the time to take phone calls – this is the official explanation; or 2. That HMRC is preparing the ground for this work to be given to private debt collection agencies (The Budget announced that a further £500m of debt will be handed over to private agencies). These private agencies, will obviously not be able to phone up HMRC offices and ask for details from confidential records.

HMRC have conducted a bizarre pilot scheme to test whether going down the route of private debt collection agencies would work. Think really bizarre and then carry on reading …

The agencies were given a tranche of work to do, and a control tranche was left with HMRC teams (but was left completely untouched).

and the result, that’s right, the debt collection agencies won!

Fast forward to reality and it will be no surprise that over half of the debts that HMRC debt collectors are given to chase up are in fact incorrect but rather than the onus being on HMRC to prove the debt, these collectors are told that if they are challenged by a “customer” the onus is on the “customer” to prove that HMRC are wrong, which is morally wrong and goes against our judicial system of innocent until proven guilty. So imagine what it’s going to be like with private agencies

So in an effort to simplify the tax position of self employed individuals, the Coalition has announced that they are to review IR35, which in theory is good news. Far too much time and money has been taken up with HMRC pursuing employment status reviews that have led absolutely no where. The latest case being that of Novasoft – it only took a mere 8 years to resolve and guess how it started – readers of this blog will as this employment tax expert has warned about it since it began – that helpful little offer by HMRC to review self employed contracts free of charge. All those people who think they can get something for nothing take heed – this whole case stemmed from an unsuspecting person naively thinking that this was the route to go because of course HMRC are completely impartial aren’t they?
Well a mega lesson has been learnt here – the individual may have finally won but it cost him £’000′s and 8 years of his life – a high price to pay, so where do we go from here – well just be very careful reviews are planned, timescale not mentioned and even worse HMRC are carrying on blindly opening tax investigations into new IR35 cases so if you are concerned about your employment status contact the experts because you don’t want to be the next statistic

With the whole question of honesty, fairness and paying the right amount of tax at the forefront of HMRC’s compliance and investigation drive, it is interesting to note that HMRC have fallen foul of the Treasury Select Committee. They have come out and questioned excerpts from HMRC’s Annual Report and quite rightly too. These reports should be factually correct but as the next few paragraphs show it’s no wonder HMRC is in such trouble, its conning itself and trying to do the same to the rest of us

4 54. In its Annual Report 2009, HMRC claims[88] that it is hitting its target to improve customers’ experience, and that “results indicate that customer satisfaction exceeds our target levels.”[89] We find it hard to reconcile these claims with its customer complaint levels and call response rates. Whilst we accept that these are not the whole picture, we urge HMRC to reflect on whether customer experiences of HMRC are yet improving as much as the DSO2 “strong progress” summary implies.

Against this background, we were surprised to see HMRC declare in its Annual Report that “HMRC has been hailed as a shining example of how to use technology to take government services to a new level.”[109] Lesley Strathie, however, remained bullish about HMRC’s IT progress, including a new agreement with its suppliers under the Aspire contract “which will significantly reduce cost for department over the coming years.”[110]

Unbelievable levels of arrogance will not improve service levels – that is a fact!

HMRC have huge problems on their hands with potential incorrect notices of coding being issued – all of which is down to new computer problems. How many times have we heard this and this isn’t have a go at HMRC Monday, it’s just getting predictably boring if it didn’t have the potential for serious consequences for some employees and pensioners.

They have stated that “work continues to identify and correct codes issued to individual taxpayers before the start of the tax year, with those most vulnerable to an overpayment being dealt with first.” – well that’s a relief isn’t it!

However, employers generally need to be aware as HMRC will shortly commence issuing notices of coding to employers. As a result of the issues encountered in January and February, forms P9 will not be issued at this point for a number of employees and pensioners where HMRC has already identified the presence of information on file which could lead to an incorrect code being issued. So employers may not receive as many notices of coding as they are expecting at first, because notices will not be issued to employers where HMRC expects more work is needed to establish the correct code. The instruction to employers is to continue to use the current tax code in 2010/11 if no revised code has been issued.

Now let’s see how this pans out when we have the full range of:

• employer compliance reviews
• PAYE investigations
• HMRC Tax investigations
• HMRC tax enquiries

Will compliance officers be adequately briefed when they are reviewing payroll records as to where the coding issues stemmed from or is it going to represent another costly exercise for the employer defending their position?