HMRC guidelines for compliance

HMRC has published a new online page including guidance on areas of tax compliance for businesses. The intention is that these pages will offer HMRC's view on complex, widely misunderstood or novel risks that can occur across tax regimes, including guidelines for employers, corporation tax and VAT. They will go beyond HMRC's view of the law (as set out in their Manuals) and address areas of compliance risk.

Background

At the Spring Budget 2021, the government announced a review of large businesses' experiences of UK tax administration in recognition of the role tax administration plays in supporting the UK's competitiveness and promoting investment. Following engagement carried out by HMRC and HM Treasury with taxpayers, a response document was published in November 2021.

The review recognised the importance to businesses of having a clear understanding of the tax treatment of their activities. To aid this, the government announced that HMRC would develop a programme of new "Guidelines for Compliance" to provide practical guidance and greater transparency on the approaches HMRC regards as higher or lower risk and the associated response.

Guidelines for compliance

The landing page for these Guidelines has now been published which explains that the Guidelines will include best practice examples to follow and steps to:

• help businesses understand HMRC's expectations and avoid non-compliance
• highlight approaches that can lead to inaccuracies and the need to pay more tax, interest and penalties
• offer insights into the practical application of the law and HMRC's administrative approaches, expanding the scope of HMRC material, beyond interpretation of the law.

Each guideline will have its own specific contact, but for general enquiries email: ccgguidelinesforcompliance@hmrc.gov.uk.

The Guidelines may apply to any tax or duty administered by HMRC, or to an issue that involves more than one tax or duty. However, so far, the page contains only general information on the Guidelines and the first specific guideline for employers, GFC1 (2022) (Guidelines for Compliance --- help with PAYE Settlement Agreement calculations), which identifies a number of errors and emerging risks associated with PAYE Settlement Agreement calculations received by HMRC and seeks to provide advice on how employers can reduce these risks.