About Guidelines for Compliance
Published 6 October 2022
© Crown copyright 2022
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Background
Guidelines for Compliance (GfC) are a suite of products for businesses and their advisors. GfC makes clear our view on complex, widely misunderstood, or novel areas of the tax rules. They may apply to any tax or duty administered by HMRC, or to an issue that involves more than one tax or duty.
Business has requested greater transparency and clarity from HMRC to help them manage tax risk. The goal of GfC is to extend our publications beyond interpretation of the law, helping you understand our expectations and get taxes right first time. We share our view of risks, highlighting approaches that may lead to errors and HMRC assessments. We share practical approaches to lower the risk of being non-compliant. Following GfC helps businesses to avoid unnecessary contact from us and to adopt a lower risk tax strategy, reducing the risk of paying additional tax, interest, and penalties.
The scope of Guidelines for Compliance
Guidelines for Compliance may cover any tax or duty that businesses account for or pay. They’re of value in areas where businesses would benefit from practical information about tax risks and a path to follow that is in line with our view of the law. Guidelines may cover subjects of interest to businesses of all sizes including complex tax issues faced by multi-national groups.
The guidance in our technical manuals and other publications is still our view of the law. GfC keep within those views but give more insight and detail in areas where we think this helps you. You do not have to follow Guidelines for Compliance, but they can help you to get your taxes right.
How Guidelines for Compliance can help
Guidelines for Compliance are an extra tool to manage your taxes, guiding the behaviour of businesses who wish to operate in a low tax-risk environment. GfC highlight interpretations that have a higher risk of non-compliance with the law and suggest an alternative, compliant path. They may also set out our preferred treatments and method when calculating the tax due for some transactions. GfC may also show common problems to avoid or share best practise when following a process.
We are developing Guidelines for Compliance using knowledge and experience from across HMRC. We ask tax advisors, professional bodies, and industry to help develop products whenever we can.
How you can use Guidelines for Compliance
We want to be more open about problems we find in tax returns, we aim to make our view clearer and to share what we see as good practise in areas we know inaccuracies occur. This gives you the opportunity to reduce the chance of a tax assessment, interest, and penalties. We also want to reduce the time spent on these issues by bringing relevant information into one place and giving links to further information. Sharing what we know about tax problems, or problems expected following a change in the law, makes it easier for you to get tax right without the costs linked to contact from our compliance teams. Where contact does occur, GfC helps you understand our position on an issue and what we expect, reducing the time taken to resolve the problem.
Choosing to follow Guidelines for Compliance may reduce your tax risk, but you are still responsible for self-assessing in line with the law. GfC are not ‘safe harbours’, we may still check returns when you have adopted approaches described in GfC. We have published information on when you can rely on advice and guidance.
Guidelines for Compliance are one place where you can find our known position for the purposes of Uncertain Tax Treatment (UTT). UTT affects only large businesses and only applies to treatments which may have tax consequences of more than £5 million.
Contact us
For general enquiries you can contact ccgguidelinesforcompliance@hmrc.gov.uk.