A Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) Investigation can be extremely time- consuming, involve copious amounts of paperwork and cause stresses around the staff and the business.

As an ex-HMRC Inspector Lindsay knows how to handle the HMRC enquiry and cut though the paperwork, focussing only on issues of relevance and avoid a fishing expedition being carried out by HMRC.

National Minimum Wage (NMW) enquiries can be carried out alone or during a PAYE investigation and these potentially carry the threat of criminal proceedings. Care must be taken in dealing with any NMW enquiries and you must comply fully with the requests of the officers.

Large amounts of tax and arrears of wages can arise when failures occur under the NMW legislation. However, there is lots to negotiate and a prompt liaison with the officers, the early establishment of dialogue and a good professional working relationship, always reaps rewards in these cases.

Many NMW failures are not deliberate and can be genuine mistakes and Lindsay will bring forward all the areas in your favour, to give your company as much credit as possible.

Benefit in Kind enquiries by HMRC cover a variety of areas and whilst most people do follow the basic rules properly they can be complicated and be an easy stumbling block.

Do you know what should go in all the boxes on a form called a P11D? Failure to declare taxable benefits in kind properly can result in huge tax settlements going back up to six years especially if you have a large number of employees and also involve payment employers & employees National Insurance Contributions. The multiples involved for what can be a small weekly tax error can result in settlements that companies can find hard or impossible to pay.

So what needs reviewing:

• Taxable Benefits in Kind, a full review of those items which should be declared on forms P11D will be carried out, but are you fully aware of how-to tax fuel payments, company vans, entertaining, travel and subsistence and the payment of a director’s personal bills etc. A review of company credit cards should also be carried out to ensure there are no infringements affecting the tax due.
• Employment Status matters. Are your workers genuinely self-employed or should they be taxed under PAYE?

Many employers as well as many accountants do not always know everything about the strict application of PAYE for employees so call Lindsay for advice if you are not sure of the facts.

For more information also refer to NMW Inspections