13th February, 2012 Time to pay turned down

Recently it has been more difficult to get a time to pay arrangement agreed with the VATman.  He has had a noticebly less sympathetic attitude towards businesses.  But why?

He is saying that where a company has recently paid out dividends, then the shareholders should support the company and not HMRC as the company chose to pay dividends whilst runnng up a tax debt.

So, you may need to use other techniques to improve your cash flow like using cash accounting of ensuring you have accounted for any bad debts to reduce your VAT liability.