Partner Article

Can’t afford your tax bill? You’ll pay if you delay!

HMRC’s approach to debt collection has recently been published, and explains what individuals and businesses should do if they cannot pay what they owe HMRC.

Most of it is fairly straightforward with no new surprises, but there are a couple of items of note.

First HMRC is currently helping 650,000 people and businesses with Time to Pay (TTP) arrangements worth more than £1.6 billion – an 11 per cent increase compared to last year (2011/2012). This is a promising sign that HMRC may be more sympathetic to short-term TTPs, although this is difficult to substantiate since HMRC stopped publishing full TTP statistics in 2011.

Second, from April 2014, HMRC will be required to start charging fees whenever they have to take enforcement action, which could increase the size of the debt even further. It is not clear what these fees will relate to or how much they will be, but taxpayers would be wise to communicate payment problems early on in order to obtain some kind of agreement.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Baker Tilly .