Capital Gains tax on 2nd home - dispute with HMRC

Hoenir

Sarahspangles said:

Bookworm105 said:

Sarahspangles said:

How are HMRC notified about the sale of a property in order to follow up unpaid CGT? If you had given an old address as the correspondence address on whatever system holds that record, and that persisted, it’s understandable they’d write there.

It’s a long time since I worked in Local Government but I recall that people were often confused about ‘walls’ between bits of Government and its agencies. For example between Council Tax and Electoral Roll and Land Registry and HMRC.

Land Registry report sales to HMRC
it is then, as you say, a question of what address HMRC has. But that does not resolve whether the accountant failed to advise tax "in time" or whether the OP failed to advise accountant of the sale when it happened.

Land Registry hold a registered owners’ contact address - this is what’s used for notification about possible property fraud. How would HMRC join that up with the OP’s current address for tax purposes?

HMRC have direct access to the Land Registry through their CONNECT database system. 

sheramber

Sarahspangles said:

How are HMRC notified about the sale of a property in order to follow up unpaid CGT? If you had given an old address as the correspondence address on whatever system holds that record, and that persisted, it’s understandable they’d write there.

It’s a long time since I worked in Local Government but I recall that people were often confused about ‘walls’ between bits of Government and its agencies. For example between Council Tax and Electoral Roll and Land Registry and HMRC.

The OP advised them by reporting it in her  tax return.  HMRC then raised the ? interest penalties for late payment.

If communications with HMRC  were online  it is possible they were not advised officially of the  change of address so the record was not updated.

splitscreenvan

Hi Folks. 

Sorry I let this drift for a while, I can see there’s a few unanswered questions or points made that I missed so apologies.

Just to clarify, it’s fair to say our solicitor and/ or accountant should have known about this and advised us. Both were made aware of the sale (the solicitor handled it). That is frustrating however both have been great for us in pretty much every other area so I’m loathed to cause too much of a fuss. 

Anyway, we’ve had letters today stating our appeal has been accepted and we can now claim back all of the penalties and interest, so it was well worth putting in the claim. 

Annoyingly we have to write an actual letter in order to claim the money back, which I have no doubt will take an age to be dealt with, but broadly speaking we have to be happy with the outcome and hopefully this post can be of use to someone else in a similar situation in future. 

I still haven’t had an update to the GDPR complaint, I will certainly be pursuing that further as a point of principal. 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply and comment.