HMRC Reviews, Enquires and investigation

HMRC ‘spot reviews’, enquiries and investigations cause businesses unexpected and unwanted additional fees and costs!

HMRC have a variety of tools and approaches in terms of reducing non compliance and ensuring the accuracy of taxpayers’ affairs in the UK including:

  • checking specific VAT returns (or VAT repayment claims)
  • querying specific issues within Corporation tax returns
  • full Corporation tax enquiries
  • Employer Compliance reviews (covering payroll (PAYE & NI), P11ds, petty cash and cash payments etc.),
  • Self assessment enquiries and
  • more serious taxpayer (non compliance) investigations

There will also be periods where HMRC are tasked with additional oversight of certain topical business sectors e.g. buy to let property, or are generally more focused on types of business activity such as ‘cash’ businesses.

Even compliant businesses can reasonably expect one or more of the above checks or reviews of submitted tax returns. Typically this occurs once in every 5 years on average, but although unwanted and potentially quite stressful for business owners, these can be dealt in a straight forward way with HMRC.

Therefore we have created the HMRC Investigation Protection Service to provide some security and ‘peace of mind’ so that, if and when, HMRC do review any aspect of a client’s business activities, we can act immediately on their behalf without any discussions around additional fees.