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The registration deadline for HMRC’s new disclosure opportunity should be extended to the next tax year, a tax investigations expert has claimed.
With the 30 November cut-off date approaching, John Cassidy said he has received more inquiries in the past few days about the NDO than since it was launched on 1 September. He credited this with a letter sent recently by the Revenue to offshore account holders to inform them of the initiative.
It is not simply that people have left it until the last minute, but that they have only now become aware that some sort of issue exists. Every single caller has queried what the letter from HMRC is all about,’ said Mr Cassidy.
In an interview with Taxation last week, the Revenue’s permanent secretary for tax, Dave Hartnett, confirmed that when the previous offshore account ‘amnesty’ was held, the 200,000 letters sent out in the final weeks led to 58,000 registrations and raised millions in back taxes.
Mr Cassidy claimed that this time around HMRC have so far written to only 35,000 offshore account holders because the department has not yet managed to obtain contact details from the majority of the 308 banks it has approached - and with many of those banks challenging through the courts the Revenue’s right to account holder information, it could be well into the spring before data is passed to the taxman.
‘There has clearly been a big flaw in implementing the NDO… The registration deadline should be extended until at least 6 April 2010 to give HMRC a fighting chance of writing to every offshore account holder personally, said Mr Cassidy, tax investigation and dispute resolution partner at PKF.
‘As personal letters combined with discounted penalties… clearly work, it seems pointless to end the registration period before the Revenue has had a chance to write to the majority of the people that could be affected.
‘There could be over a 150,000 account holders who will miss out simply because they have flicked past HMRC’s adverts in the press and not seen Dave on YouTube [alerting viewers to the NDO].’
