HMRC's Soft Landing

Further to my article yesterday about the problems facing SME's wrt next year's RTI launch, and the seven day window for submitting data, it seems that HMRC are signalling that the first year of RTI will be "RTI Light" wrt penalties.

Payroll World quote Ruth Owen (HMRC's Director General of Personal Tax) who has drawn the short straw of being responsible for RTI:

“We are minded towards the soft landing approach so giving people perhaps a year to run RTI before we move into the new penalty regime.

Bearing in mind that with the migration some bigger organisations aren’t coming onto RTI until next summer then we believe everybody deserves a bit of a default period before we start heading into penalties.

I believe that most businesses will comply and want to comply and our most important thing is let’s get the tax in and let’s get RTI up and running as opposed to creating work for everybody, which is penalties – we’d rather have the money than the penalties.”

It seems that HMRC will issue "dummy" penalties to employers from April 2013 (which will not incur a real fiscal cost), in order that they are made aware when they have not complied with their RTI duties.


Tax does have to be taxing.

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