Rules of the scheme must be followed

The taxpayer was a qualifying employer for the purposes of the coronavirus job retention scheme (CJRS) and made claims for support payments to five employees. It was accepted these employees were furloughed.

After an enquiry HMRC issued assessments to recover some of the payments to which it considered the taxpayer was not entitled.

The taxpayer appealed. It had increased the pay of two employees to reflect the extra work that they were doing after two of the other employees had retired. It had claimed support on the increased salaries but because they were no longer claiming for the retired employees the overall support had not increased materially. This it argued was within the spirit of the CJRS.

The First-tier Tribunal disagreed saying the CJRS had to be calculated by reference to the salary paid to each employee. As these were variable rate employees the...