CISR49020 - Register and maintain subcontractor: scheduled review: explanation of scheduled review

| CISR49600 | Action guide contents | |—————————————————————————————————–|———————–|

Scheduled or Ongoing Review is the annual Tax Treatment Qualification Test (TTQT) which is carried out automatically against all current subcontractor records (except for Trust subcontractors) holding gross payment status. This process started from October 2007. The scheduled review runs once during a 12 month period, to confirm whether or not the subcontractor is meeting allof their obligations under the Taxes Acts, and that they may therefore continue to hold gross payment status under CIS.

Where, however, the subcontractor is a Trust, the Scheduled Review will not run automatically and a manual review will be carried out instead each year for the Trust subcontractor. (This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000)

The areas that will be tested under the Scheduled Review will be the same as for the Tax Treatment Qualification Test (TTQT) (see the guidance at CISR43070 for a full explanation of these). For a company subcontractor the Scheduled Review will only look at the Compliance of the company itself and not at the compliance of the Directors or Shareholders of the company.

For Partnerships, all the partners registered for CIS who hold gross payment status will have the same scheduled review date (this will include any new partners admitted to the business since the last scheduled review). The Scheduled Review for the partners in a Partnership will look at not only the compliance of the Partnership itself, but the compliance of all of the partners in the business as well.

The Scheduled Review will not take place at the same time each year for each subcontractor as cases are selected for Scheduled Review by the computer randomly. So, for example, in 2008-09 the Scheduled Review might take place in October 2008, in 2009-10 it might take place in September 2009, and for 2010-11 it could take place again in August or September 2010. However in all cases the scheduled review will look back at the last 12 months (the ‘qualifying period’) to see whether the subcontractor has met all of their obligations during that period.

Note: You should not get drawn into any discussions with the subcontractor as to when the Scheduled Review will be carried out. It is sufficient to advise that this will be at least once in any 12 month period.

Where CIS detects that a subcontractor has made some compliance failures since the last Scheduled Review was undertaken, (for example, four consecutive late monthly contractor returns have been submitted), the Scheduled Review will be run by the computer automatically at an earlier time than otherwise it would have, had these failures not occurred (this is known as the ‘System Ad-hoc TTQT (see CISR43140).

To undertake a manual TTQT please refer to the guidance at CISR43070 which will direct you to the relevant guidance depending upon whether the subcontractor is an individual, a partner in a partnership or a company.