In Chapter Trading v HMRC [2015] UKFTT 458 (16 September 2015) the FTT found that the failure to deduct under PAYE had been caused by the employer’s lack of care so that the tax could not be assessed on the relevant employee.
As a result of a change of PAYE code for one of its employees Chapter Trading should not have made any payment of salary. Indeed its payroll software had generated an exception report entitled ‘insufficient pay for tax’. However because that same payroll software had been set up to deduct no tax where on a cumulative basis the tax exceeded an employee's pay it still had made payments to the employee.
The FTT noted that HMRC accepted that the failure to deduct was due to an error made in good faith but that it considered that the company had...
