HMRC extends record checks for small businesses
December 2011
HM Revenue & Customs has announced an extension of its Business Records Checks programme. Business Records Checks were piloted earlier this year and involve checks on the adequacy of small and medium-sized enterprises’ business records.
The pilots found that around 44 per cent of those businesses visited had issues with their record-keeping, with 12 per cent of those visited having seriously inadequate records.
HMRC will be now be extending this activity from mid-September with plans to complete up to 12,000 Business Records Checks by the end of the current financial year and 20,000 provisionally planned for 2012/13.
Initially, HMRC will only levy a record-keeping penalty in the most extreme cases of poor record-keeping. However, in the future, it is intended that penalties of up to £3,000 will be issued for serious inadequacies in record-keeping.
A guide to setting up a basic record-keeping system is available at www.businesslink.gov.uk/startrecordkeeping/

