Managing Risk

HMRC are now concentrating their efforts on identifying potential systems failures and aspect enquiries as opposed to "paper trail" based compliance reviews.  This adds to the workload of already hard pressed employers to comply with their onerous employment taxes reporting obligations

Our experience to date suggests that many companies have procedures in place to ensure that corporate tax and VAT are correctly accounted for but their employment taxes obligations fall between a number of departments, eg finance, HR, payroll, accounts etc with no-one person taking sole responsibility.

This can result in the correct treatment of expenses and benefits not being identified, missed deadlines and HMRC recovering not only tax and NIC but also interest and penalties.

Salary sacrifice arrangements not being correctly implemented can also result in NMW/NLW failures which can lead to public "naming and shaming" even where the amounts underpaid per employee may seem trivial.

Frequently, we can identify systems improvements that can save employers' money as well as potential tax, NIC, interest and penalties. HMRC will only tell you where you are going wrong not how to mitigate liabilities for the future. We can do both and with less disruption to your business.  We can also help you to introduce systems to allow HMRC to suspend penalties.

Typical areas where we find that employers frequently fall foul of HMRC visits include:

• Failing to identify non scheduled hours for NMW
• Expense policies which have not been formalised or which are not being followed in practice
• The engagement of consultants and other self employed individuals.
• Foreign workers visiting the UK and UK employees being sent to work abroad