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Quick Response
If you set up a new company, Companies House tell the Revenue, and the Revenue send you a little questionnaire to ask what it does, when it will be preparing accounts, and so on. Strangely, up to this year it appears that there was no rule to make you send this back - you could ignore it if you wanted to! But most people did reply - why wind up the taxman if you don't need to?
Now they have decided to make it compulsory. If your new company started business for the first time on or after 1 August 2004, you have to send particulars to the Revenue within 3 months of that start date, whether they ask you for them or not - on pain of a penalty.
If you set up a new company, you usually let your advisers know, and your advisers should remind you about this. But if you only get your accountants in at the end of the year to write up the annual accounts, they are likely to have a much more pained expression this year if you say, "oh, by the way, we set up a couple of new companies during the year...". Watch out for the new requirement, and please keep us informed of new companies.
The basic rule is in FA 2004 s.55, but the details are in the Corporation Tax (Notice of Coming within Charge - Information) Regulations 2004. The prescribed details to be notified are:
* for all companies: the date of the commencement of the first AP, together with details of the company itself (name, registered office, principal place of business, nature of business, accounting date, names and addresses of directors);
* in the case of a business formerly carried on by others, the name and address of the former business and the name and address of the person from whom the business was acquired;
* in the case of a company which is a member of a group, the name and registered office of the parent company;
* in the case of a company which has been obliged to comply with the PAYE regulations before the date of notification (i.e. possibly after the commencement of the accounting period), the date on which that obligation first arose.
A failure to notify is subject to the penalty provisions of list 2, s.98 TMA 1970. The penalties are therefore up to £300 for the initial failure, up to £60 a day for continued failure once the initial penalty has been imposed, and up to £3,000 for fraudulently or negligently providing incorrect information. |
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