Readers' forum : Penalty problems

My practice consists substantially of construction industry subcontractors. I have two penalty problems that I hope readers can advise on.

In the first case the client had not provided accounting records for 2014-15. The 31 January 2016 filing date came and went and a £100 penalty was incurred. Despite this records were not produced. In fact this year I had several subcontractors in this situation. To avoid £10 daily penalties being incurred I filed returns with provisional figures spending 30 April using HMRC’s online system to do this. Unfortunately when I came to this client – the last one – I did not notice that the HMRC self-assessment year was set to 2015-16 rather than 2014-15. I thought all was well until the client received a demand for daily late-filing penalties of about £450 for 2014-15. I immediately filed the same figures for that...