Readers’ forum: Coded out

We had a problem in December 2019 whereby our anti-money laundering renewal did not go through quickly enough. As a consequence HMRC’s agent maintainer team switched off our agent codes for about seven weeks until early February 2020. This was despite our reacting as quickly as possible at that difficult time of year. We pleaded with the department to turn the codes back on by 31 January but to no avail.

Despite HMRC knowing of the problems we were experiencing it decided to add to them by sending penalty notices to the 62 affected clients and then not attending to the appeals for about eight weeks. All or so we thought self-assessment tax returns were re-filed and all the penalties were cancelled.

However in the confusion three returns were overlooked. Those final 2019 returns were re-submitted just after the self-employment income...