Judicial review against new forms P87

Several tax refund companies have launched a judicial review against the following decisions of HMRC:

• to introduce from May 2022 a mandatory form P87 for claiming tax relief on PAYE employment income;
• to include in that form a field for applicants to provide an employer’s PAYE reference number without indicating that completion of this field is not a mandatory requirement for submitting a valid claim; and
• an alleged threat to suspend the processing of claims for tax relief submitted by each of the claimants if HMRC considers a ‘high level’ of forms to be incomplete.

The claimants are all high volume agents (HVAs) and have each operated for at least eight years. Their business models have relied on submitting tax relief claims using bespoke online forms. Now that HMRC has mandated the use of the P87 form the claimants can no longer use their own bespoke forms. They say this...