FDs / CFOs - are your tax controls adequate?

The Government announced a number of measures in this week's budget to ensure that businesses and individuals pay the right amount of tax and reduce the opportunity for evasion, avoidance or non-compliance. The clauses which I suspect will be mostly of interest to readers of this blog are:

- it will legislate for the publication by HMRC of the names of both corporate
and individual taxpayers who incur a penalty because they have deliberately
understated more than £25,000 of tax;

- it will establish a statutory requirement for senior accounting officers of major corporates to certify personally that adequate controls to prepare accurate tax computations are in place;

- HMRC will require those who have incurred a penalty for deliberate
understatement of over £5,000 of tax to provide more information about
their tax affairs for up to five years to ensure they have proper systems to be
able to make a correct tax return; and

- HMRC will shortly issue a draft code of practice on taxation for the banking
sector, along with a consultation document.


This will be quite a significant issue for in-house tax functions, and clearly means that the FD / CFO of a business has a personal motivation for shining a torch over the systems and controls that are in place to ensure that the tax computations process is solid, thereby delivering accurate CT returns to HMRC.

This may lead to companies upgrading and investing in better tax technology solutions to put in place greater automation over the tax computations process, thereby increasing accuracy and reducing risk of error through possible out-of-date spreadsheet methods.

This new budget development will certainly be a topic debated at Talentpool's forthcoming Tax Technology discussion evening, to be held at the IoD on 29th April.

Top 10 firm senior tax guys appointed to top level banking positions

Rob Withecombe has been appointed as head of wealth advisory at Barclays Wealth. He joins the London office from Grant Thornton where he was a partner, head of tax and a member of the firm’s operational board. Withecombe joined Grant Thornton in 1996 and was the tax partner in a regional office until 2002. With over 20 years’ experience he has also worked for KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Kleinwort Benson has also appointed Jeremy Croysdill as head of tax services. His career began at Ernst & Whinney in the personal tax group, transferring to the private client services of Ernst & Young on its merger with Arthur Young. He joined Stoy Hayward in 1990 where he dealt with high net worth individuals providing them with compliance and planning initiatives, trust work and IHT advice. He joined Kleinwort Benson in 2005, most recently as part of the product advisory team.