Tax Investigations....

[TheMonkey]

**** - that reminds me that I haven't paid the HMRC PAYE for about 4 months. Not got any reminders yet.

[xoggoth]

Atw's right, that £1k for a tiny mistake is crap. What they DO DO is slap in big estimates of tax due without attempting to quantify it properly and leave it to you to disprove it.

[AtW]

What they DO DO is slap in big estimates of tax due without attempting to quantify it properly and leave it to you to disprove it.

But this is mainly doable in case of cash-in-hand operations like plumbers - if all you do is contract with invoices payable by cheque/bank transfer, then it would be rather hard to slap an estimate, unless of course there are some funny big deposits into your personal account, but I am not sure IR is actually allowed to look into personal account of director easily, though allegedly IR will just smash your toes with a hammer.

[oraclesmith]

I believe they can inspect your personal accounts if they are linked to your business accounts - eg. if you have paid for business expenditure (not expenses necessarily) with your personal account/credit card and been reimbursed by your company through the Directors Loan Account. I don't think salary and divi payments count, but just where the original business transaction was done with your personal account.

[xoggoth]

Yeh, provided you can show what the real figure is you should be ok. In my case when I might have owed them a k on expenses they just added up the entire expenses in the accounts including all the valid stuff and van costs which I had already paid tax on as a BIK. I challenged it and ended up with a small rebate in the end.

Bloke next door to me was stupid enough (he is VERY stupid) to casually remark that he might have paid some money for logs into his personal account and not put it in the books. He got assessed for thousands. Cost him a a bit to disprove it as he had not kept personal bank statements and had to pay for about three year's worth.

And don't believe accountants if they tell you you have no choice but to pay up. Ignoring them and challenging things has certainly paid me in the past.

PS They cannot demand to see personal accounts without making a separate application

[AtW]

Cost him a a bit to disprove it as he had not kept personal bank statements and had to pay for about three year's worth.

But banks keep this info for at least 3 years?!??!

[oraclesmith]

Yeah, presumably he had to pay the bank for copies.

[AtW]

LTSB now put online whole statements, definately going back a few years.

[oraclesmith]

The whole bank account history on-line ? Great for identity theft !!

If I ever mention I'm getting an on-line bank account, just give me a slap !

[AtW]

The whole bank account history on-line ? Great for identity theft !!

If they can see it, then they have already stolen it, plus, do you think they would care about your past spending when they got into your bank account?