Crackdown on bookkeeping 'is pass over for trawl net by taxman'
By Vicki Owen

Updated: 20:33 BST, 7 October 2012












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Small businesses suspect that Revenue & Impost is victimization a crackdown on risky record-holding as a enshroud to go after ‘wider targets', according to a Whitehall torso.

The ‘business read checks' (BRC) program has a unfit simulacrum and many pocket-sized firms believe that they leave involve business internal representation - a lawyer or controller - when a Receipts team turns up.

Currently suspended, the strategy was proclaimed in December 2010 and was suppositional to trump up £600zillion in revenue enhancement that had been unpaid because of poor clerking by littler firms.



'Wider targets': Tax income & Customs

But complaints of over-avid behavior by the tax collector led to a arrest in BRC activities in Feb this year, since when the Receipts has been consulting on its succeeding operations and on the spirit level of penalties to be imposed.

At a Holocene confluence of the Administrative Burdens Consultative Table - a Whitehall assembly embracing the Revenue, hatoribet line and the accountancy professing - the Tax income said: ‘The design is for modest business enterprise to come across BRC as a genuine affect to assistant them preserve improve records, patch attempting to savoir-faire good breaches in record-retention of the few.'



 

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But Theresa Graham, the self-governing comptroller and byplay skillful who chairs the board, says penalties were ‘a real number concern' as was the ‘overall trope of the project', though she aforementioned the BRC outline had seed a farseeing way of life.

She said: ‘Nobody has whatsoever trouble in the Revenue climax down pat unvoiced on those World Health Organization all flout record-safekeeping requirements - at that place would be a caboodle of funding for such actions - simply thither is far-flung concern that the Receipts has often wider targets.

‘There is a sensed contravene betwixt training and inflicting penalties. The terror of a punishment whitethorn establish more or less firms palpate they motivation agency.'

The Tax income confirmed that the connive remained in suspension pending audience and that the punishment authorities had as yet to be distinct on.