COTAX Manual

COM151001 - CT Pay and File: assessments: introduction

CT Pay and File was introduced for company APs ending on or after 1 October 1993. CT Self Assessment replaced CT Pay and File for Accounting Periods (APs) ending on or after 1 July 1999. You now need to issue only a small number of CT Pay and File assessments.

For a CT Pay and File AP a company had to:

• pay the CT due for the AP by the due date (see Glossary for more information) with or without an assessment
• deliver a return by the filing date (see Glossary for more information) 

The Technical Caseworker then issued an assessment or a loss determination to finalise the liability for the AP (see COM151000).

Assessments had to be made for every case with any income. Technical Caseworkers therefore issued an assessment even if:

• reliefs entirely covered the profit and there was no net liability to tax for the AP
• they also made a loss determination under Section 41A Taxes Management Act 1970 for the same AP

The process for making CT Pay and File assessments was as follows:

• a Clerical Caseworker captured the computation of profits and tax payable from the company’s return onto COTAX
• COTAX automatically copied this to the assessing function for use in making an assessment
• a Technical Caseworker screened the return and made a CT Pay and File assessment using the appropriate assessing function

This is the process that you still need to follow if, exceptionally, you receive a return for a CT Pay and File AP.

There are other types of assessments on companies for which you need to make a manual assessment and record the charge on the SAFE IT system. For more information see COM23130.