HMRC’s powers to open an enquiry into a return

Produced by Tolley in association with

Owner-Managed Businesses

Guidance

Introduction

An important clarification needs to be made to help in the understanding of this note. Whilst the legislation refers to an ‘enquiry’, HMRC now refers to enquiries as ‘compliance checks’.

As this note specifically covers HMRC’s powers, the term enquiry has been used to match up with the language used in the legislation. However, some of the other material referred to, such as factsheets, includes the term compliance checks rather than enquiry.

For the purpose of this note, an enquiry and a compliance check have the same meaning.

An HMRC Officer has the power to either correct a return or open an enquiry, and each of these processes is discussed below.

For more details about compliance checks, see the Types of checks on returns guidance note. For details of what to do when a compliance check is opened, see the Opening letter to a compliance check guidance note and other guidance notes in that subtopic.

Correcting a return

An Officer can, within nine months

Continue reading

To read the full Guidance note, register for a free trial of Tolley+™

TAKE A FREE TRIAL

Guy Smith

Popular Articles

Personal Tax

Foreign tax relief

Foreign tax reliefIncome and gains may be taxable in more than one country. The UK has three ways of ensuring that the individual does not bear a double burden:1)treaty tax relief may reduce or eliminate the double tax2)if there is no treaty, the individual can claim ‘unilateral’ relief by deducting

14 Jul 2020 11:44 | Produced by Tolley Read more

Tax Returns

Owner-Managed Businesses

Trade or hobby

Trade or hobbyInteraction of hobby farming rules and commercialityFarming has its own set of ‘hobby farming rules’, which historically have stated that a profit must be made every six years. This is known as ‘the five-year rule’, in that there can be five years of losses but there must be a profit

14 Jul 2020 13:50 | Produced by Tolley Read more

Personal Tax

Self assessment ― amendments and corrections

Self assessment ― amendments and correctionsOnce a self assessment tax return has been filed, both HMRC and the taxpayer (or the agent) has the right to make changes to the return. There are different time limits depending on whether it is a correction by HMRC or an amendment made by the

14 Jul 2020 13:37 | Produced by Tolley Read more

��Ӱ��