Tax Investigations

The powers of HM Revenue & Customs continue to grow, as do their campaigns targeting certain types of businesses.

Of course, this means that all too frequently, careful record-keeping and compliant taxpayers find themselves caught up in the net and suddenly subjected to the full impact of an HM Revenue and Customs tax enquiry.

Even when the enquiry concludes that all is in order, the impact to a business can be considerable.

If you’re being investigated

If you find yourself in the spotlight, we can help guide you through the investigation. We have former HMR&C inspectors in our team who are able to guide you through the process and apply the benefit of their understanding of the Revenue’s approach.

Protecting yourself

Of course, ensuring that your tax affairs are completely compliant is key.   But even demonstrating compliance once you’re being investigated can eat up time and potentially incur additional advisory. We offer our clients Professional Fee Protection to cover those additional costs so that they don’t have that to contend with on top of the disruption of the enquiry.

How we’ve Helped:

• We front HMRC interventions in order to allow the client to run their business and not manage the relationship with HMRC.
• We mediate between HMRC and the taxpayer, often in face to face meetings, to ensure that all parties understand the others and reach speedier conclusions on enquiries.
• We act as a second opinion to other firms of tax advisers in order to ensure that enquiries which are not being resolved speedily are given a fresh perspective from parties who do not have entrenched views in a matter.
• We provide appropriate disclosure to clients’ commercial situations in order to minimise the risk of HMRC enquiry and therefore minimise client distractions.

I am a sculptor with a very simple business and straight forward tax that Richard Verge looks after for me every year, so I was shocked and surprised when I received notification that I was being investigated.

The investigation required me to stop everything and go through years worth of paperwork. Not something I needed whilst having to continue with the day-to-day issues of making my sculpture and running the business. Of course, it also meant that my requirement for support from Richard and the tax team suddenly became significant and immediate. As well as interrupting your own business, the impact of an investigation is that your tax adviser also has to drop everything to help.

I know that Richard and the team did all they could to help reduce the stress and impact on me but they spent a considerable amount of time. So my bill for that year ended up being three times as much as my normal bill. After all that, there wasn’t a single extra penny of tax due but goes to show that anyone can be subject to one of these investigations.”

Thank goodness that I had the professional fee protection in place so all that was covered and I didn’t have that to worry about on top of it all.

- Dawn Rowland FRBS, Sculptor