CTM93180 - CTSA: the filing obligation: accounts to be delivered

FA98/SCH18/PARA11

A company is usually required to deliver a copy of its accounts as part of its return.

When a company is:

• resident in the UK throughout the return period, and
• required under the Companies Act 2006 (or the equivalent Northern Ireland legislation) to prepare accounts for a period that coincides with or overlaps a period for which it is required to deliver a company tax return, the accounts it is required to deliver, as part of its return, are those accounts.

These are the full accounts that companies must send, on demand, to members under S394 Companies Act 2006. Companies are also required to file accounts with the Registrar under s441 of that Act. For filing purposes only, companies can file accounts with reduced disclosures. For example, they can file the full accounts but with the profit and loss account (and the related notes) and/or directors’ report removed. This is known as filing “filleted” accounts, and is a filing exemption under s444 of the Act. The accounts required by HMRC are those full accounts as prepared for the members, not the ‘filleted’ accounts.

Where group accounts are prepared under s399 Companies Act 2006, there is a requirement to prepare an individual profit and loss account for the holding company of the group under s408(3) of that Act. S408(3) permits and provides for exceptions from disclosing that profit and loss account in the group accounts. Where that disclosure exception is applied, HMRC still require that profit and loss account submitted as part of that company tax return.

Holding companies must deliver copies of the individual and group accounts as part of the company tax return. In practice they can be combined into one document and there is no objection to this practice. However, consolidated accounts that do not also give details of the holding company’s individual balance sheet and profit and loss account are not, by themselves, sufficient.

You should note that a company which is itself a parent but also a subsidiary either of;

• another UK company, or
• a company incorporated under the laws of another European Union state,

need not prepare group accounts provided the ultimate parent’s consolidated accounts are publicly available in English.

FA98/SCH18/PARA11 does not cover companies not resident but carrying on a trade through a branch or agency in the UK, see CTM93250.

A company not incorporated under the UK Companies Act or its Northern Ireland equivalent, for example a building society, or an industrial and provident society, must submit the accounts that it is required by law or by its constitution to prepare, covering the period to which the return relates.

As in the case of companies covered by Paragraph 11, there is no requirement under the filing obligation for them to prepare more detailed accounts than they are otherwise required to prepare.