HMRC's Army of Home Inspectors

 

HMRC has hired an army of almost 500 new valuation agents to snoop on homes.

The Valuation Office Agency’s annual report up to the end of March showed that staff costs had risen by £31.5 million and the total Full Time Equivalent staff number has risen by 493, a ten-times increase in the hiring rate on the year before. The agency is being merged with HMRC. It said:

“The rise in staff costs is primarily due to our pay award, and an increase in agency staff costs of approximately £12 million to support performance recovery and data enhancement work to improve our Council Tax data quality.”

The agents will be able to demand entry to homes for “internal inspections” to determine whether they are worth over £2 million and will therefore have to pay Reeves’ so-called Mansion Tax. If you don’t let them in you will get a £200 fine or worse.

However, it is not as simple as that (irrespective of the fine) the current law does not give HMRC the right to enter your property to poke around in order to try and find evidence to hike the valuation for your Labour's new so-called 'High Value Council Tax Surcharge.' 

Currently HMRC can ask the occupier to agree a time for an inspection but if the occupier refuses to agree, HMRC has to apply to the First-tier Tribunal for approval. 

The occupier can object to the inspection on reasonable grounds for example that the inspection is not reasonably necessary; the proposed intrusion is disproportionate to the tax issue at stake; HMRC has not identified what an internal inspection would actually establish; adequate substitute evidence has been offered, or HMRC's proposed inspection is speculative or a fishing exercise. 

These legal rights are a significant practical obstacle to Labour's 'mansion tax.' A system involving hundreds of thousands of valuations could scarcely make an individual First-tier Tribunal application every time an owner refused access without creating a substantial administrative burden.

Additionally, in the event a tax surcharge is made on a property, if that property is then sold for less than £2M the taxpayer can request a refund. IHT refunds are already an administrative nightmare, imagine the chaos of Burnham's mansion tax! 

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