CH411350 - Charging penalties: contract settlement: accepting the offer

The taxpayer’s offer must be authorised in accordance with the guidance at EM6402a and COG914570.

Where the offer is payable in full you must, for Class 1, 1A and 6 contracts

  • complete the SAFE stencil in SEES - Forms and Letters. Send the completed SAFE stencil to either your SAFE nominee or the Centralised SAFE Team in Local Compliance to ask them to create a charge on SAFE, see EM6403 and COG915105. You should only use the SAFE 2 amendment stencil for amendments that you cannot process electronically
  • send the person the letter of acceptance as set out as in EM6410 and COG914570
  • update NPPS.

When the Contract Settlement Form (CSF) is going to be stored electronically, the letter of acceptance should be saved and finalised in Caseflow/CRMM Case Document Store and must be named ‘Letter of acceptance’. The document classification should be ‘Offer and Certificate’.

Where a penalty is suspended you must

  • treat the amount of the suspended penalty as a separate instalment, see EM6306. Do not raise a SAFE charge for this instalment
  • where there are other instalments, make sure the suspended penalty instalment is the last instalment but again, do not take any action to raise a SAFE charge for the additional ‘suspended penalty’ instalment

Note: In cases where any penalties included in the offer are suspended, the ‘Net Offer’ amount on the SAFE Class 1 contract settlement stencil is not the same as the ‘Net Offer’ amount on the CSF. The latter has to be reduced by the amount of the suspended penalties included in the contract.

  • send the appropriate version of the letter of acceptance included at EM6410 or COG914570, see below
  • for single payment offers with an additional ‘suspended penalty’ instalment, use the single payment acceptance letter
  • for instalment offers with an additional ‘suspended penalty’ instalment use the instalment payment acceptance letter
  • date the letter of acceptance on the day the suspension period starts
  • make sure suspension details are entered into NPPS
  • do not send the PDF copy of the NPPS3.

The letter of acceptance should be saved and finalised in Caseflow/CRMM Case Document Store and must be named ‘Letter of acceptance’. The document classification should be ‘Offer and Certificate’.