Background
A number of house buyers had entered into SDLT mitigation schemes, in each case advised by the same advisers. HMRC claimed to have raised SDLT assessments on them, on the basis that the SDLT mitigation scheme was ineffective, slightly before the expiry of the four year time-limit for making discovery assessments.
All of the appellants said that they were unaware of the assessments for some years after they were made. The assessments were part of a batch of 122 assessments purportedly made on 18 February 2013 by HMRC’s unit which looked at identifying SDLT avoidance. The unit concentrated on SDLT returns made by taxpayers who had instructed agents which HMRC considered had implemented SDLT avoidance schemes, and looked for discrepancies between the declared price paid on Land Registry forms compared to the SDLT returns of those taxpayers.
The first correspondence received by the taxpayers were copies of the assessments sent to them by HMRC in 2016-2018.
After becoming aware of them, they all sought to appeal them. Their grounds for doing so were that the assessments were not validly made, and even if they were, they were not validly issued.
