Insolvency News, Issue 6 (November 2021)

Please ensure that your 2021 regulated insolvency fee income won’t exceed your fee band. If you need to change your fee band please email insolvency@icaew.com as a matter of urgency.

If you are interested in applying for an insolvency licence for the first time and you would like the licence to be in place by 1 January 2022, please ensure you apply as soon as possible. You should normally allow between 8 and 12 weeks for applications and it is a particularly busy time of year for our applications team.

If you haven’t already done so, please make sure you carry out your 2021 compliance review before the end of the year. Guidance to support you and your staff in conducting compliance reviews, including frequently asked questions, help sheets, forms and checklists are available. 

With the growing numbers of energy supplier insolvencies, the Insolvency Service is concerned about the treatment of customers, particularly those who had outstanding debts at the time of the insolvency.

In the latest in our series on moving into new regulated areas, we look at what your firm needs to do to start working in probate in England and Wales.

At the start of October, HMRC advised us that its VAT426 team was testing a solution that would allow it to significantly increase the number of payments that it could make, enabling it to progress cases and payments to IPs. This has helped to address the issues that the team has faced with the movement of work and redeployment of staff.

Since then, HMRC has confirmed that the team has not only been able to reduce its backlogs to within Service Level Agreements, but has gone beyond that, and is now working current cases. There remain a few hundred cases that are more complex and require further intervention so IPs will be contacted by the team to resolve these, rather than just having them rejected.

Over the next few weeks IPs should start to see payments coming out as their Finance teams are now processing several hundred payments per day.

We would like to hear from IPs whether they feel there has been an improvement with the speed their cases and payments are being processed - please notify us by the filling this form out.

• After the ‘Recording tax and national insurance – preferential dividends’ bulletin, sent 9 June 2021, prompted further questions, HMRC have released updated guidance and provided answers to some frequently asked questions.
• IPs have been mistakenly sending numerous different versions of the VAT7 postal form to HMRC which has been causing admin issues. Please read this guidance from HMRC that explains which form you should be using and what you should be doing with the form.
• As part of HMRC’s work to improve the customer journey for IPs, it is introducing a dedicated Account Manager for insolvency related Customs queries. It is also introducing a new mailbox for insolvency related cases. Find out what you will need to do.

A recent ICAEW Restructuring and Insolvency Roadshow looked at the welcome return of face-to-face monitoring and discussed some of the key compliance topics IPs need to keep an eye on.

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