Guidance

Visits by agreement or advance notice — CC/FS3

Updated 1 April 2022

Visits — by agreement or with advance notice

As part of a compliance check, we may ask to visit your business premises if you have any. This is so that we can look at your records or business assets and find out more about how your business operates.

We only visit if we think it’s necessary. A visit can help us complete the check more quickly and effectively.

If you need help

If you have any health or personal circumstances that may make it difficult for you to deal with a compliance check, please tell the officer that’s contacted you. We’ll help you in whatever way we can. For more information about this, go to www.gov.uk and search for ‘get help from HMRC if you need extra support’.

You can also ask someone else to deal with us on your behalf, for example, a professional adviser, friend or relative. We may however still need to talk or write to you directly about some things. If we need to write to you, we’ll send a copy to the person you’ve asked us to deal with. If we need to talk to you, they can be with you when we do, if you prefer.

How we arrange a visit

We normally carry out visits with your agreement. We’ll contact you by phone or letter to arrange a date and time for the visit. We’ll usually give you at least 7 days’ notice. If you need to change the appointment, please tell us as soon as possible.

If we’ve not been able to get your agreement to a visit, we may still need to visit your business premises to carry out an inspection. If we do, we’ll normally give you advance notice. We’ll also give you a notice of inspection. This is a legal document that allows us to inspect your business premises, assets and statutory records. Statutory records are the records that tax laws say a person must keep.

In some circumstances we may carry out an inspection without giving advance notice or seeking agreement. You can find more information about this in factsheet CC/FS4, ‘Unannounced visits for inspections’ and CC/FS5, ‘Unannounced visits for inspections approved by the tribunal’. You can get a copy of these factsheets online. Go to www.gov.uk and search for ‘Compliance checks factsheets’.

If you do not think we should visit, please tell us why. We’ll explain why we want to visit you and why we think a visit is the best way to carry out our check. There may be other ways for us to get the information we need.

About the visit

You do not have to be present at the visit, but it’ll be helpful if you are. This will allow us to ask you any questions about your business and how it operates, and discuss the outcome of the visit with you.

This will also help us complete the check as quickly as possible and reduce any inconvenience that it may cause you.

If you cannot be there, someone else must be there to give us access to any assets or records that we need to see. We’ll normally tell you in advance what records or assets we need to see. If we’ve given you a notice of inspection, this will give you details of what we need to inspect and when.

If you have an adviser, we may contact them to tell them about our check. You can ask your adviser to be there when we visit. If you prefer, we may be able to look at your records in your adviser’s office or in our office. Please tell us what you want to do.

A visit can take anything from a few hours to a few days. This will depend on the size of the business and how complex the matters we’re looking at are. When we arrange the visit, we’ll let you know how long we expect it to take.

We do not usually need to talk to people who work for you about our check. However, we may ask to speak to the people who keep your records up to date, such as payroll and finance records. We may also need to speak to some of the people who work for you if we’re looking at their employment status. If you do not want them to know about our visit, please tell us.

We may need to take some of your records away to check in our own office. If we do, we’ll explain why. We will:

• give you a receipt for your records
• keep them secure
• return them to you as soon as we can

If you need them back sooner, we’ll make copies and give these to you.

If you have any business assets that are kept somewhere other than the premises we’re visiting (for example, if you have more than one premises), we may need to arrange a further visit to see them.

If you run your business from home

We’ll normally only visit you at home if you run your business from there. If your business premises are also your home, or if you keep any stock or other assets at home, the visiting officers will only be able to enter those parts of your home which are used for business purposes. This is unless you invite them in or they’re carrying out a valuation.

If we’re checking your Income Tax or Corporation Tax liability we may need to value your private premises if it’s relevant to our check. We may also need to value property in your private premises. This is if we’re checking your liability to:

• Stamp Duty Land Tax,
• Stamp Duty Reserve Tax
• Inheritance Tax

or to check any liabilities that relate to Capital Gains Tax.

If we’ve given you a notice of inspection and you do not comply with it

If we give you a notice of inspection and you do not allow us to carry out the inspection, we may ask an independent tribunal to approve an inspection. If they approve an inspection and you still do not allow us to carry it out, we’ll charge you a £300 penalty. You might also have to pay further penalties of up to £60 a day until you allow us to carry out the inspection.

We will not charge you a penalty if you have a reasonable excuse for not allowing us to carry out an inspection that’s been approved by the tribunal. Please tell us straightaway if you think you have a reasonable excuse.

A reasonable excuse is something that stopped you from meeting a tax obligation on time which you took reasonable care to meet. It might be due to circumstances outside your control or a combination of events. Once the reasonable excuse has ended, you must put things right without any unnecessary delay.

Whether you have a reasonable excuse depends upon the circumstances in which the failure occurred and your particular circumstances and abilities. This means that what is a reasonable excuse for one person may not be a reasonable excuse for someone else.

Examples of reasonable excuse may include, when:

• you’ve been seriously ill
• someone close to you has died
• you’ve lost the documents in a fire or flood

The Human Rights Act and your privacy

Article 8 of the Human Rights Act gives you the right to respect for your private and family life, your home and your correspondence. We have the right to carry out an inspection in a reasonable and proportionate way even when it conflicts with your rights. If you think our inspection is not reasonable and proportionate, tell us why.

Concealing, destroying or disposing of documents

We may charge you a penalty if you or another person acting on your behalf conceals, destroys, or disposes of any document that we:

• have asked for in an information notice
• told you that we intend to ask for in an information notice

It’s a criminal offence to conceal, destroy dispose of any document that we:

• have asked for in an information notice that has been approved by the tribunal
• told you that we intend to ask for in an information notice that has been approved by the tribunal

We may carry out a criminal investigation with a view to prosecution if you or someone acting on your behalf commits this offence.

What happens if you give us information that you know to be untrue

We may carry out a criminal investigation with a view to prosecution if you:

• give us information that you know to be untrue, whether verbally or in a document
• dishonestly misrepresent your liability to tax or claim payments to which you’re not entitled

More information

If you’re not happy with our service tell the person or office you’ve been dealing with. They’ll try to put things right. If you’re still not happy, they’ll tell you how to make a formal complaint.

This factsheet is one of a series. For the full list, go to www.gov.uk and search for ‘Compliance checks factsheets’.

Our privacy notice

Our privacy notice sets out the standards that you can expect from us when we ask for information or hold information about you. Go to www.gov.uk and search for ‘HMRC Privacy Notice’.