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Members meet for tax forum

On 24 September representatives of the UK firms met to talk about tax.  This was the fourth meeting of the tax focus group and the first one to be held outside of London.  We met at the Offices of Rowleys in Leicester and were made very welcome by our host Mark Hook.

There were two presentations during the day.  During the morning session we had a presentation on Income Tax at 50% and Planning Solutions from Silver Planet Tax.  Chris Steele and Andy Wilson showed us a range of tax planning schemes with varying degrees of risk. In our discussion after the presentation we shared our own approach to the schemes. There were a variety of views as to how useful we found this type of planning to be in practice.  However, we were all agreed that an awareness of what is available is vital so that we can discuss these schemes with our clients before somebody else does.

In the informal discussions either side of the presentations our recent experience of HMRC enquiries was a common theme, so we were all very keen to hear from Emma Neal of CCH who gave the afternoon presentation. Emma reported that HMRC are now focusing on telephone enquiries, pre-tax checks and cross tax enquiries, which caused us all to rush back to the office to check our insurance cover.  We also heard about HMRC’s risk-based approach to enquiries and their focus on the quality of record keeping, leading to some stiff penalties where standards are low.  The Targeted Enabling, Education and Leverage interventions were new to some of us, in particular the news that they can apply outside of the normal enquiry window.  HMRC Inspectors now have individual targets to meet and are likely to focus on aspect enquiries to maximise the yield to cost ratio of their enquiries.

It was clear from the flurry of business cards at the end of the day that we all went away with plans to follow up with each other, on some aspect of the day, in telephone calls and meetings over the forthcoming weeks.

Elaine Durrant
Tax Partner
Milsted Langdon