ECH6135 - Liaison - Centre for Research and Intelligence (CRI)

Gross Payments Made to Non-Employees for Services Rendered

Section 16, TMA 1970 permits the issue of a notice requiring a business to make a return of payments it has made to non-employees for services they have provided to the business. CRI is responsible for obtaining information these returns from various types of organisations. CRI provides the information to RIS and other Revenue & Customs users via the TPI Mart. Therefore it is important that caseworkers are aware of the need to identify worthwhile sources of this type of information when conducting compliance checks and that they liaise with CRI accordingly.

During a compliance check you may see a substantial number of payments that are not subject to PAYE made to recipients who were engaged to provide a service. In these cases CRI will want to consider issuing section 16 returns to the organisations, to enable RIS to check that the recipients are declaring the payments correctly. You should

• consider the status of individual recipients ECH11010. When satisfied of self employment, if payments exceeding £1000 per annum have been paid to a substantial number of recipients without deduction
• send a brief report to CRI including

CRI will then contact the organisation to explain that they will be sent a section 16 notice as soon as possible after the following 5 April requiring a return of payments for the year ended on that date. CRI normally requires returns on an ongoing annual basis unless instructed otherwise, so you will need to tell CRI if this is not appropriate in your case.

Please note that section 16 only covers payments for services rendered. It does not require a return of any other payment type. So you should confine your section 16 instructions to CRI to service related payments.