ATCS04240 | Advance Tax Certainty Service: Process: Early engagement and clearance applications: How HMRC will acknowledge and process clearance requests

Within 3 working days, customers will receive an acknowledgement email from the Advance Tax Certainty Service confirming receipt of the application and setting out next steps. Applications will be given an application reference number on receipt to be used in all future clearance correspondence and meeting summaries.

Within 5 working days of application submission, Advance Tax Certainty Service administrators will process clearance requests by:

• where necessary, checking applications meet eligibility criteria and that no exclusion criteria apply, clarifying information with the customer where this is unclear

• where necessary, reviewing whether other, more suitable routes to certainty are available

• checking the clearance submission contains all required information, including that identified and requested during the early engagement meeting

• identifying where the level of assumption required due to timing may prevent HMRC giving an opinion

• identifying the regimes and types of issue to be covered and assigning lead subject matter experts and potential technical partners in policy to consider the clearance

• establishing resource capacity based on required turnaround time

• flagging opportunities for linked Advance Pricing Agreements (APAs) with HMRC’s Business, Assets and International (BAI) Transfer Pricing Team

• engaging Customer Compliance Managers (CCMs) and temporary CCMs (tCCMs) to check the issue has not previously been considered under a clearance, enquiry or other compliance check

• extracting key details into a high-level summary for use in briefing and the scoping and planning meeting

Where information isn’t fully provided, HMRC will work with the customer to gather all necessary information, and the clearance process timeline will begin once this has been supplied. If, after this, an application for a clearance request still does not include sufficient information for HMRC to assess its acceptability, the Advance Tax Certainty Service will not begin a full review until the missing details are provided. The applicant will be contacted promptly to explain what is needed and given a reasonable timeframe to supply the information.

If the applicant does not respond or provide sufficient clarification within that timeframe, the request may be treated as withdrawn without further review. HMRC will treat the application as received on the date all relevant information has been provided.