Our Top tips on making tax disclosures
Always take professional advice before making a disclosure:
- Check whether any of HMRC's open or past Disclosure Opportunities are relevant to your situation.
- You may well be able to limit the period for which you make a disclosure. This depends on the facts of the case and how they interact with the legislation.
- You may have a large range of tax-deductible expenses and items on which you may claim Capital Allowances, you will need to know what to claim, and whether in some situations you may claim a proportion of certain expenses.
- If you are correcting returns already submitted you may be prevented to making some changes due to the operation of Overpayment Relief.
- You will need to consider HMRC's powers of discovery when you make changes to previously submitted returns and understand HMRC's approach on the 'presumption of continuity'.
- You may need to consider what basis of accounting to use from 6 April 2013.
- You will need to consider the rules on Penalties which may be different if you have used one of HMRC's promoted disclosure opportunities, and how they affect your case.
- You may be able to make a time-to-pay agreement in respect of tax areas and you need to address this issue from the outset. HMRC's debt management section has a history of bad communication with its other areas within HMRC and this has the potential to waste a huge amount of everyone's time.
If you need assistance or investigation support contact us.