Information to Subcontractors
HMRC will no longer give out payment and deduction details to subcontractors and their agents as a matter of course.
It has long been HMRC’s practice to help subcontractors completing their records at year end by providing payment information that is missing from their own records. This has increasingly given rise to three problems:
- Subcontractors and some agents come to rely on HMRC for this purpose rather than keeping their own records.
- The information held by HMRC is only as good as the information contractors have returned.
- As a result of 1 and 2, the subcontractor is at increased risk of making an incorrect or incomplete tax return, and HMRC has been burdened with a degree of administration which the CIS system was never designed to include.
As a result, HMRC have announced that they will no longer provide bulk lists of payment details for a full year to subcontractors or their agents on demand. Instead, the subcontractor or agent will have to show that they have tried to request individual pieces of missing information from the contractor and have failed.