|
Restaurants and other retail outlets with certain types of computerised tills are being warned they could be targeted by HMRC for unannounced visits to check on takings.
Leading accountants and business advisers PKF, said unannounced visits are not particularly new for Customs and Excise, but the fact that Revenue staff are also present and that they are altering the operation of the tills to extract audit trails of entries is a new practice.
Tony Moorby, director of tax at PKF’s office in Bristol said: “Whilst former Customs officers are authorised to make such visits, former Revenue officers are not. We were previously told that the Revenue would not piggy back on Customs’ powers. This aggressive approach will worry many small businesses.”
HMRC knows that certain types of till can be set up to suppress takings so that businesses can evade both VAT and income tax and is sending in specially-trained officers to businesses using those tills to extract a full audit trail of the till entries. This can mean that the HMRC officer has to reprogram the till to get the data they have been sent to collect.
Tony added: “We know of at least one case where the alterations made to the computer till were not reversed and have caused the restaurant’s staff problems ever since.”
This project, carried out in several areas in the UK, is another example of the risk-driven approach that HMRC is now taking to tax investigations. The data collected is to be analysed by HMRC’s regional risk centres to identify significant discrepancies between the full records and the till rolls that businesses use to help prepare their tax returns.
“It is understandable for HMRC to sharpen up the targeting of its tax investigations but this should not be allowed to slip over into sharp practices at the taxpayer’s premises,” added Tony.
“Law abiding businesses will be worried by these sorts of visit, especially if the business owner is not present or HMRC’s handiwork on the till means it has to be reprogramed. This sort of disruption of businesses is not acceptable and will make it far less likely that taxpayers will cooperate with other HMRC intervention activities.”
|
