MLR1PP6200 - Penalties guidance: the correct legal entity

Warning letters and penalty notices should be sent to the proper person for the legal entity, and where there is a different Nominated Officer it should also be copied to them.

The proper person is, for:

The Nominated Partner and the Company Secretary are individuals appointed to act on behalf of the legal entity - that is, on behalf of the partnership or the company itself. HMRC normally deals with these individuals in its correspondence. So if we have the details of these specific individuals, warning letters and penalty notices should be sent to them. Without these details, we should address warning letters and penalty notices to the legal entity itself, as named in their MLR registration.

As a general principle any penalty action, including warning letters, must be taken against the person who is accountable within a business. (Also referred to as the accountable person)

Ultimately the person liable to the penalty is the ‘relevant person’, which is the person named in regulations 3 and 4 of the MLR 2007, who the regulations apply to. So this is who the notice should be addressed to, where the ‘relevant person’ has not appointed a specific individual to act on their behalf.

To clarify, as an example, if the ‘relevant person’ is a company called J Jones Ltd and they have appointed John Smith to act on their behalf, the letters should be addressed to :

When issuing warning letters a copy should be sent to any Accountant who is acting for the business providing that we have authority of the business to deal with them directly for MLR matters.