Scammed by Entitlements Agency

00ec25 wrote: »

No you cannot make that assumption

as far as HMRC is concerned, you have an agent and the agent is the person they should send all, and any, future refunds to until such time as you directly inform HMRC that the company is no longer your agent.

it is vital that you find out what the terms of the contract you have with the company are, since there must be something in it explaining how you can terminate it.

Don't just assume you can walk away cleanly from the company, they may have some sort of tie in period in the contract, so telling HMRC not to deal with them again may leave you open to being in breach of contract with the company if you have not terminated that contract in accordance with its terms.

That isnt correct.

It needs to be made clear that Authority to act on a persons behalf, and a Deed of Assignment are 2 very different things.

Authority to act on a persons behalf DOES NOT imply there is an authority to receive a repayment.

In fact, if all that exists is an Authority to act on someones behalf, then a repayment would always be issued to the taxpayer, unless a valid, signed nomination or Deed for the year in question has also been received prior to the refund being issued.

Deeds of Assignment and Nominations CAN NOT roll on to future years.

Both are limited to only receive repayments of tax for valid year, where the tax is deemed to have already been paid.

That means that Deeds and nominations are only valid for tax refunds issued for previous (already ended) tax years, and then are limited to the last 4 years.

Deeds and nominations CAN NOT be submitted for future years.

The current tax year is considered in most cases to be a future year. This is because tax is not deemed to have been paid until the tax year ends.

The only exemptions to this are:

In-year repayments following the death of a taxpayer, at the tax is deemed as paid from the date of death.

In year repayments where the taxpayer has declared they will not receive any further taxable income in the tax year.

In respect of Deeds of Assignment and Nominations, they will only apply to the years indicated on the Deed/Nomination. They must be signed and valid. Deeds have to conform to specific wording and be set out in specific formats.

With regards to Authority given to a 3rd party to deal with your tax affairs, this can be rescinded at any time by the taxpayer, as can the authority to repay to a Nominee which has been given on a simple/bare Nomination only, but this is not the case with a Deed.

Nominations are also only valid at HMRC's discretion. If they have reason to believe a Nomination is invalid, fake, etc, etc or if the taxpayer requests, then it can be ignored.

This however is not the case with a Deed of Assignment.

Once a Deed of Assignment is signed it can only be rescinded by agreement of the Assignee (the person/company authorised to receive the payment) and the Assignor (in these cases the taxpayer).

Without that agreement the refund LEGALLY belongs to the Assignee.


As a bit of background to this issue. The reason why there has been such a huge increase in the use of Deeds of Assignment is because, when these companies used to submit claims on behalf of taxpayers, with a signed nomination to receive the refund, taxpayers would call to rescind the nomination, or HMRC would issue the refund direct to the customer for various reasons, meaning the company would not receive the payment, and in turn may lose out on their 'fee'.

Therefore they started to submit Deeds of Assignments which guarantee them the refund where one is due.

They then should deduct their fee (+vat and other charges if notified in their terms and conditions), and send any residual money (if any) to the taxpayer.