Do you want to pay tax of over £10,000 on the fictitious income you have not earned? That was the tax bill sent to one taxi driver who was selected for investigation by the tax office and which was based on “experience” and “information received”. The eventual increase in tax was under £1,000.
All UK trading businesses must submit an annual Self Assessment Return and every Return is a potential target for an investigation and please be aware taxpayers are not immune either. Tax investigations regularly produce in excess of £10billion of additional funds for the treasury each year.
Any UK taxpayer can be selected at random for an investigation. Also, the tax office have targeted specific trades over the past year, and these have ranged from plumbers to hospital consultants. They have also increased the number of company enquiries. You never know when an investigation might start as HMRC are continually gathering data, from third parties, which could relate to you or your business. Armed with this information the Revenue may have prejudged the outcome before the investigation starts leaving you to prove why they are wrong.
The enquiry process can be extremely stressful and time consuming and the costs of a thorough and proper defence can easily mount up to thousands of pounds. Expert professional advice is essential in order to deal with the highly trained Tax Inspectors and ensure the best results for you. Most agents who defend their clients during even a basic tax enquiry will require many hours of their time and we believe that no one should have to concede to the Revenue’s demands purely on a commercial basis. It can take thousands of pounds in professional fees to prove your innocence – unexpected costs which are unwanted and unnecessary
Professional representation can save thousands of pounds in tax and penalties. The taxi driver mentioned above is only one of a number of horrific examples of tax inspectors exaggerating facts well beyond what most people would consider to represent the truth and demand tax and penalties which cannot be described other than draconian and which would without challenge would have lead to the person involved being declared bankrupt.
Are you safe from the taxman or are you the Revenue’s next target?
In order to protect our clients we offer an inexpensive Tax Investigations Package that provides expert representation in the event of a selection for enquiry, the premium for which is less than 1 hour of professional representation. We provide full professional care, we handle the tax authorities on behalf of our clients, we deal with all correspondence and meetings with the Tax Inspector, we negotiate the best possible result. In other words clients taking the cover are fully protected from any further professional costs.
As with all insurance products you hope never to have to make use of the cover. However, failing to pay between £50 and £100 now could result in a bill of over £1000 or, like the taxi driver above, a demand for tax of more than £10,000.