CISR31100 - Register and maintain contractor: overview: Cessation of trade of Contractor

| CISR31600 | Action guide contents | |—————————————————————————————————–|———————–|

There is no functionality within CIS to enable you to note the cessation of trade of a contractor. Any notification of cessation to operate in the Construction Industry will need to be passed to the parent SA/COTAX Processing Office, in order that those records may be noted.

However, where a contractor permanently ceases to take on any subcontractors, but continues to act as a subcontractor themselves, then any such notification should be referred to the contractor’s End of Year section for the Contractor scheme. This will be noted on the Employers Business Service (EBS), and that information will flow over to CIS. The date the scheme ceased will be displayed under View Customer for the contractor under ‘Scheme Details’.

If the contractor element of a scheme has ceased via either a Full Scheme Cessation or a Scheme type change to a ‘PAYE’ only type scheme the contractor must be advised that no further returns will be required to be submitted after the requested date of cessation or scheme type change date. This can be advised during the initial call to advise of their change in circumstance or via letter if the request has been received in writing from the contractor or a redirection from another HMRC department. Any outstanding CIS300 returns not received before the date of cessation, these are still required and need to be submitted, however, no returns are required after the requested cessation date.

The contractor would need to be advised that if they did take on subcontractors again in the future they would need to contact HMRC to advise of the change of circumstances before submitting any new CIS300 returns to allow the scheme to be updated accordingly (i.e. reopen scheme if within allowable timescale or set up new scheme if not and scheme type change the non CIS scheme back to CIS) so that the new returns are correctly accepted by the system.

Where the contractor informs you that they have ceased to trade or permanently ceased to engage subcontractors and there are CIS Monthly returns outstanding but the contractor has not informed you of the date when the last subcontractor was paid, you will need to take additional action in CIS after noting EBS of the cessation. The action to take is set out in the guidance at CISR65200.