Tax enquiry or Tax investigation – we can offer you peace of mind

Unfortunately, no one is immune from an HMRC enquiry no matter how much care you as a taxpayer, or we, as your advisers, take with your personal and business tax affairs.  Tax enquiries can be very time consuming and expensive to deal with – even if HMRC have made a mistake in opening the enquiry in the first place. This is why we offer our clients a tax investigation service each year.

The service:-

• Covers our fees for dealing with any tax enquiries into income tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax.

HMRC’s information systems have improved in recent years.  They are therefore much more efficient at matching details of information reported to them by third parties, such as banks, letting agents, employers and pension companies etc to information reported on Tax Returns. As a result, we have seen an increasing trend in enquiries where the information reported on Returns does not match what HMRC are expecting to see.

Sometimes this is due to simple human error, for example, forgotten interest where the interest is rolled up into a three year bond or a client forgets to tell us about a new pension.

The HMRC computer system can also be wrong.  For example, we have seen employment income recorded in the wrong person’s name causing all sorts of confusion.

Unfortunately the costs of dealing with even relatively simple enquiries can quickly mount up as the taxpayer is guilty in HMRC’s eyes until proved innocent!

• Allows us to attend any VAT or PAYE inspection visits from HMRC free of charge and to deal with any queries arising from these visits and ensure that these do not escalate into a full HMRC enquiry. Over the past year we have seen a sharp increase in these visits.

All of our business clients who subscribe to the tax investigation service appreciate this part of the service offered as such visits can be quite stressful.

• Gives our business clients free access to a 24 hour business and commercial legal helpline manned by over 70 specialist lawyers who can answer your queries on topics such as maternity rights for your staff, holiday pay, redundancy, health and safety in the workplace and problems with your debtors.

We will be sending out information in March about the tax investigation service and we would recommend that you think carefully about subscribing as, in our view, this will give you peace of mind.

Hopefully you will never be subject to an HMRC enquiry but, if you are, having the associated accountancy fees covered does help relieve the pain.

If you would like to discuss this further, please do not hesitate to contact us.