Tax Planning

Giovanni Bracco PwC LLP and Agnes Quashie PwC Legal LLP explain the importance of documentation when implementing tax planning under the new powers regime

Since the publication of HMRC's Litigation and Settlement Strategy (LSS) in June 2007 HMRC has continued to develop an increasingly robust approach to investigating the fact pattern surrounding tax planning. This strategy has resulted in HMRC focusing on the quality of both the actual implementation and the documentation of that implementation. For example the LSS document says: 'Do not assume the facts are as described in the scheme. Check for implementation failure and always consider a penalty if an avoidance scheme fails because it has not been implemented correctly'; and: 'it is not uncommon that what purports to be avoidance on closer inspection is shown to...