This week's opinion

The discovery rules continue to create surprise. Many First-tier Tribunal cases are concerned mainly with the ‘available information’ point but the latest one  T Bubb (TC4992) deals with a different issue.

The taxpayer made two errors in his return. HMRC raised a discovery assessment to correct error one but failed to include the second one in the assessment even though both were for the same year. The tribunal decided that error one was not careless but that error two was. It then said that the assessment was not valid because the amount assessed (to correct error one) did not stem from a careless mistake. Neither could it be amended to bring error two into charge even though that was careless. So the taxpayer did not have to pay the tax even though he had been careless.

This is an odd outcome even though I follow the...