New strategy to fight PAYE backlog
The Inland Revenue has adopted a new strategy for dealing with its massive backlog of open pay-as-you-earn cases.
Instead of dealing with cases on a year-by-year basis, the Revenue will now look at the entire case history for an individual, which may span a number of years, according to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph.
The Revenue said it hoped to clear 98% of its 8.5 million cases using this method and the 1,250 additional staff employed for this task. News that the Revenue was to recruit more than 1,000 new staff was revealed by Accountancy Age last month.
Letters are to be sent out to some individuals requesting tax information dating back six years or more. But such individuals will not be fined if they do not have P45 forms for these years.
The scheme was criticised by Chas Roy-Chowdhury of the ACCA who told the Daily Telegraph that there needed to be some kind of ‘policy’ for dealing with people ‘landed with a liability that they do no know about’.
He said the initiative was a mistake on the Revenue’s part because the individuals involved were those least aware of the tax system as they did not fill in a tax return.
Links
New staff may mean tax bill deluge
Accountants report Revenue’s failures