Back to basics: Cross-tax enquiries

Only the hardest of hearts would not skip a beat on receiving a notice from HMRC opening an enquiry into your business’s tax affairs. Your heart may well skip a few more beats should you receive a notification that HMRC intends to carry out a compliance check using ‘cross-tax working’. This means that HMRC will coordinate and combine compliance checks into different taxes (direct tax PAYE NICs and VAT) into one comprehensive review of a large company’s or LLP’s tax affairs.

Recipients of such letters should not panic. The...