Interesting times

I confess that for some years while interest rates have been low I have not been checking HMRC interest calculations in detail. Most of my small collection of clients pay on time; when one of them has missed the deadline by a few days the amount has been too small to make auditing worthwhile. However occasionally something seems so wrong in principle that I have to argue about it – on my own clock rather than the client’s.

The starting point

I have a client who received generous self-employed income support scheme (SEISS) and local authority support taxable in 2020-21 and 2021-22. Her business did not appear to be picking up very fast after the pandemic; the absence of comparable grant income meant that in January 2023 2022-23 was looking considerably worse than the previous year. As she prepared accounts for...