Readers’ forum: Is there a duty to disclose negligible income?

My client is a self-employed garden designer registered for self assessment. She is an avid collector of china and porcelain. Quite often she will buy an item online which is a better example of something that she already has and will sell the older item on an online auction site. She doesn’t buy pieces to sell and I am sure that she is not carrying on a trade or a business. However some of the items which she sells are quite pricey and it is likely that in one year she will sell enough items to exceed the €2 000 limit which will trigger a report to HMRC from the platform operator.

Do readers recommend that my client should make some sort of white space disclosure on her tax returns to pre-empt a question from HMRC as to why she has not declared her income from online sales...