HMRC to suppress time to pay statistics

HMRC has confirmed that July’s statistics on time to pay, which reveal that £1.02bn of taxpayers’ money remains outstanding under the scheme, will be the last to be published.

The most recent figures on time to pay, provided by HMRC’s business payment support service, show that £7.71bn in total has been deferred by businesses with cash flow problems, although £6.69bn has been repaid.

The figures show that a total of 444,000 time to pay agreements have been made since November 2008, although the number of deferrals have been in decline since late 2009.

Just over £1bn remains outstanding, of which around £650m is overdue, but the insolvency profession and the public will be left in the dark over these levels after HMRC decided not to publish them in future.

The revenue ran a six-week consultation on the figures earlier this year, but only had two responses, one internally and another from the Treasury. After it closed, HMRC decided that it will stop publishing the statistics after July.

No press release was issued as HMRC did not view it as “high profile” enough, and none of the RPBs or the trade body R3 was made aware of the consultation. 

R3 president Frances Coulson said: “Time to pay has played a vital role in preventing the spike in corporate insolvency numbers that usually follow the end of a recession, and we are concerned to learn that HMRC will no longer publish the official statistics on this from July. We believe they are in the public interest.”

A spokesperson for the Insolvency Practitioners Association said: “It does seem that the IPA was not approached about this consultation. It is a little surprising that the HMRC representatives that spoke about time to pay at the IPA conference in April 2011 also did not mention it.”

A spokesperson for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland (ICAS) said: “ICAS was not aware of the consultation and we are in agreement that the stats would be useful for the industry.”

A spokesman for HMRC said: “Time to Pay should be a short term aid to businesses. Repeated requests may be a sign that the business is no longer viable. It is not fair if HMRC give preferential treatment to some businesses by giving them easier terms.

“Therefore, given that a repeat request is more likely to be refused it is entirely understandable that the number of refusals is increasing as a percentage of requests made.”