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Weekly Technical Bulletin - 5th March 2010

FINANCIAL REPORTING

1. Companies House are paying particular attention to balance sheet disclosures and may reject sets of accounts for errors on this page. These include not stating the name of the director who signed and audit exemption statements quoting CA85 where the accounts were prepared under CA06.

2. The 14 day period for resubmitting faulty accounts to CH no longer exists. Therefore accounts rejected which were filed in the last few days before the deadline will result in late filing penalty.

3. Accounts received by CH just before the deadline might not be processed until afterwards; in which case they would be correctly filed (and not incur penalty), but the public filing history will show a date that appears to be late and could affect the company’s credit rating - another reason to avoid last minute filing.

4. In contrast, we have found that accounts emailed to the Charity Commission have showed the correct receipt date on the public register, even where they have taken several weeks to be processed and published.

DIRECT TAXES

1. TAX

1. Coding notices: HMRC have issued further updates on what they seem to be calling, somewhat euphemistically, the annual coding mismatch. In summary, it appears that HMRC have tried to correct the position, but if coding notices still appear to be incorrect, the taxpayer or agent must contact them.

2. Publishing details of deliberate defaulters: 1 April 2010 has been appointed as the date on which s94 FA 2009 will come into force. This authorises HMRC to publish the detail of taxpayers where it is established that they have committed certain serious tax offences.

3. As indicated in the Weekly Bulletin for 8 January 2010, many time limits change in just over three weeks. The vast majority are reduced to 4 years. HMRC has issued a reminder of some of the more important issues. Note especially that a self assessment taxpayer who has a claim for the year 2004-05 must submit it to HMRC by 31 March 2010 (yes, that is right, 31 March). Claims for the 2005-06 year are close behind and must be made by 5 April 2010.

INDIRECT TAXES

VAT

1. HMRC have announced that from 1 April 2010, all cheque payments made by post will be treated as received only when cleared funds reach HMRC’s bank account. They recommend that taxpayers therefore allow three working days for the cheque to reach HMRC and another three days for the payment to clear. “Late” payments are of course subject to default surcharge. This change will not affect cheque payments made by Bank Giro.

OTHER

1. The Bank of England has kept interest rates at a record low of 0.5% for the 12th consecutive month. The decision was widely expected by economists, who believe that any rise in the cost of borrowing could damage the UK’s fragile economic recovery. Also as expected, the bank has not pumped any more money into the economy under its quantitative easing programme.

Whilst every effort is made to ensure accuracy, information contained in this publication may not be comprehensive and recipients should not act solely on the basis of this information.

For further information on any of the above please email technical@larking-gowen.co.uk