HMRC to mandate the format of claims for employment expenses

From 6 May 2022 claims for income tax relief on employment expenses must be made on the standard P87 form.

Robotics will accelerate the processing of the updated form, as long as claims don’t include attachments.

Currently claims for income tax relief on employment expenses can be made using one of the following options:

• a self assessment tax return;
• online service available to taxpayers (but not agents);
• print, complete and post the P87 form available on gov.uk;
• by phone (subject to limits) if a claim has been made for a previous tax year; or
• substitute claim form or letter. Substitute claim forms are widely used by high volume repayment agents.

Changes to the P87 process and form

Some changes have been made to the P87 form. For example, it now has the functionality for multi-year claims. The new form is available on gov.uk from 21 March 2022 and will be mandatory from 6 May 2022.

HMRC will be using “hyperscience” – a sophisticated form of optical character recognition/robotics – to process the forms without human intervention. It will mean that the applications must be fully compliant to be processed automatically, that is have no attachments.

Any forms with attachments will not go through the automated process but will be put to one side for manual processing. While the automated forms can be processed quickly, the manual ones will take much longer.

Digitally excluded taxpayers will still be able to request a hard copy of the new P87 form.

Source Financial Accountant click here to read more.