The Treasury has unveiled a consultation on how to rid the UK of "incompetent, unprofessional or unscrupulous" tax advisers, which may include mandatory membership of an accrediting professional body.
As part of the 2024 Budget documents, HM Treasury has opened a consultation: Raising standards in the tax advice market - strengthening the regulatory framework and improving registration.
It says the aim is to weed out and eliminate those "incompetent, unprofessional or unscrupulous practitioners who continue to operate, harming their clients and the public finances."
The consultation, which will run for 12 weeks from March 6 to May 29 2024, will explore the following:
- potential approaches to raising standards
- whether the government should pursue introducing a requirement for paid tax practitioners to be a member of a recognised professional body that supervises their professional standards
- how professional bodies and the government can work together to raise standards of tax practitioners
- which groups of tax practitioners should be in scope or excluded from the proposed option
- a first step of mandating registration with HMRC for tax practitioners who wish to interact with HMRC on behalf of their clients, and the requirements that HMRC should establish to enable registration.
According to HM Treasury: "The government welcomes views on whether tax practitioners should be required to register with HMRC to be able to interact with the department on behalf of their clients.
"The government also welcomes views on whether mandating membership of a recognised professional body that supervises tax practitioner standards, for either the whole tax advice market or some tax practitioners, represents effective, proportionate, and reasonable action to raise standards."
Financial advisers have had to align with an FCA-registered accrediting body in order to obtain their statement of professional standing. This was brought in with the retail distribution review, which came into force at midnight on 1 January 2013.
Such a move would be a significant change for tax advisers. According to 2022 figures, there are more than 40,000 tax agent firms in the UK.
simoney.kyriakou@ft.com
