With due dates for Corporation Tax, Income Tax and VAT having recently passed, ourselves and our clients have gained much experience of application to defer taxes under the Government's Business Payment Support Service.

It has been announced that the first six weeks of the service's operation led to a deferral of £224m of taxes with a further £326m pending decision.  The average deferral to date has been £15k and, in respect of deferral requests of less than £10,000, decision can be made within minutes of the call being placed.

As a firm we have found the helpline to be responsive and pragmatic in their dealings with requests.  The experiences that we and our clients are finding are that requests for deferment of taxes of less than £10,000 are generally accepted without query and an offer of payment terms of less than six months leads to a positive confirmation as long as the  tax at stake does not run into the hundreds of thousands.

Our requests were made prior to the due date of tax falling due. This is in accordance with the conditions for use of the helpline and may explain the positive responses that we are receiving.
Credit should be given where credit is due.

HMRC set up the helpline from scratch soon after the announcement in the Pre-budget report.  Although this is a new concept and is a service that is experiencing high demand, it has proven to work as anticipated without teething problems.

Many of our clients are subject to gross status for Construction Industry Scheme purposes. A major concern of any business with gross status is to maintain that status so that receipts do not attract any retention. Soon after the commencement of the service HMRC appreciated that the construction industry would be a major beneficiary of it. They also acknowledged that business was concerned that application for deferral of tax may lead to loss of status. HMRC took this concern on board and in a short period of time provided comfort that gross status would not be lost.  A further example of the appropriate resource and effort that HMRC are applying to the service.

As one of our clients has said about the service, “we are still looking for the catch”.  Fortunately there does not seem to be one.