CH232800 - How to do a compliance check: information powers: financial institution notices: compliance with the notice

Normally the Financial Institution will respond to an information notice by providing the required information or copies of the specified documents. As the Financial Institution will not know about the FIN until it is issued you should provide an HMRC email address and phone number so that they can contact you. If the Financial Institution has any concerns about whether they can comply with the FIN, you should discuss their concerns about compliance as soon as possible.

The Financial Institution may ask that the request be varied or that additional time is necessary to comply with the notice. You should consider their proposals if, in your opinion, they are reasonable. You should consult an authorised officer, who will need to agree with your decision and authorise any amended FIN.

In most cases you should allow 30 days for the Financial Institution to comply with your request. You can give a longer time to comply if you are asking for a lot of information. If there are particular difficulties in obtaining the documents, you should consider extending this, for example, to 40 days. If you have discussed this with the Financial Institution you can agree with them a reasonable extension to the deadline. This should be confirmed in writing. If you are already corresponding with the Financial Institution by email, then an email detailing the extension is sufficient.

Form of Documents

You may be able to accept extracts of financial data where this can be provided more conveniently than documents, but without prejudice to HMRC’s statutory rights.

You should request that documents are provided in electronic format wherever possible, see CH232300. However, you should be considerate where Financial Institutions have a good reason why they cannot do this, and be prepared to accept documents in another form unless there is a good reason not to do so.

Where electronic copies are provided, the Financial Institution will need to ensure that the copy can be decrypted and read by HMRC. If this proves not to be the case, you should first contact your Data Handling Specialist (DHS) for advice. Your DHS may instruct you to contact the Financial Institution to request a copy that can be decrypted. This encryption method will need to be agreed between HMRC and the Financial Institution. This process may already be in place so check this with your DHS.

You should bear in mind that these arrangements are aimed at minimising, for you and the Financial Institutions concerned, any practical difficulties arising from action under, or compliance with, the legislation.

Should there be disagreement in a particular case about the interpretation of these arrangements or the legislation itself, for example whether a Financial Institution has complied with a formal notice or not, you should request specialist technical advice from (This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) .