A £158BN hole in the public finances means that HMRC are being used to try and raise extra cash for the Treasury, as quickly as possible and that will mean easy targets, so small and medium size firms, anyone in the construction industry are in the direct firing line for:

employer compliance reviews

PAYE/NIC investigations

Employment status reviews

tax investigations

you name it and they are heading your way and don’t think it won’t happen to you – it will, so why not take advantage of the special deal that EICG is running this month on PAYE/NIC healthchecks and Construction Industry reviews, call us today on 0800 917 9176 to see how we can help you avoid being a victim

The current delays within HMRC are getting ridiculous and it’s not just the taxpayers that are having problems, even professional tax advisers are having problems.

Sue Moore, associate director for BTT and A, has been struggling to get hold of anyone at HMRC.

“We’re having difficulties when dealing with the HMRC. It would seem that most offices are eight weeks behind dealing with post. When you telephone it is just the call centre and if you want to speak to somebody actually dealing with the case, that is almost impossible. All this was before the cuts in the department spending.

Everybody is affected by the delay. Issues take longer to resolve and cost the clients more in professional fees as we have to keep chasing HMRC. Working on a case is very inefficient as we have to pick up the threads of the case after several months’ delay.”

Now we are finding that we are having to escalate matters in order to get a response to correspondence which is no good for anyone

HMRC are planning a massive increase in the take from: tax investigations, employer compliance review, tax enquiries, employment status reviews and CIS reviews, so you have been warned

HMRC plans to seize an extra £4bn in 2010/11 through more aggressive tax investigation work and tougher powers. To achieve such a high yield, HMRC will need to widen the scope of its enquiry work to include marginal cases. This increases the risk innocent businesses are caught up in a massive fishing exercise

Tax investigations can be hugely costly to taxpayers in respect of management time, stress and advisory fees, while much of the tax HMRC claws in through investigations is not tax that has been deliberately evaded, in many cases it is the result of HMRC reinterpreting tax law and this brings in the well known scenario of my pockets are deeper than yours – otherwise known as if an individual or business can’t afford to challenge HMRC’s decision through the tribunals and court system, then HMRC wins.

So you have been warned, take specialist advice before it happens to you

It has now been a year since HMRC introduced the internal review system which was intended to be a bridge between the case worker and the First Tier Tribunal in cases such as tax investigations, employment status cases and HMRC penalties to name but a few areas. Initially viewed with suspicion, and still to a certain extent, HMRC have published figures on the process to date.

Unrepresented tax payers have been relatively enthusiastic to use the system, probably on the basis of what have they got to lose – this made up 81% of those using the system. There are however strong distinctions to be drawn between automatic penalty cases where approximately half were cancelled compared with those that are far more substantiative. Even the latter category showed that about 25% were either cancelled or varied – so there is a definite moral here – don’t reject the internal review system out of hand it can be a useful process if dealt with correctly you just need to make sure the person dealing with your case understands the process. So, if you need advice call us today on 0800 917 9176