I’ve recently a guest on a couple of tax investigations CPD podcasts. A couple of listeners have been in touch with me to ask how common are nudge letters and in what volume are they being issued?
The latest figures we have are from 2021/22 in the HMRC annual accounts and report for 2021/22.
As you can see from HMRC’s table there were 9640 nudge letters issued for the Covid Job Retention scheme and 53986 for self-employed income support.
Whilst I would expect these numbers will start to fall on Covid schemes there is a lot of activity in this area.
Definitive numbers for other areas of tax were not included in the report, which is a little disappointing. We are back to best-estimates, and I would the numbers will be lower in more specialised areas of tax. It will depend on the HMRC campaign at the time and the numbers being targeted.
Click to here the full tax investigations podcast.
Criminal cases
In the second podcast I touched on criminal cases. These are rare but HMRC’s 2021/22 report confirmed:
If your client is subject to criminal proceedings the client will need specialist assistance. However, when you compare with the number of nudge letters, the criminal cases are insignificant.
Listen to the tax investigations podcast to hear how to handle the detailed process.