CISR12110 | The Scheme: contractors: government departments

All public offices or departments of the Crown (including any Northern Ireland department and any part of the Scottish Administration) are required to operate CIS as contractors where they spend over a certain amount on construction work (see CISR12050). Most government departments will be involved.

This is provided for at FA04/s59 (1)(b) and covers both main government departments and their agencies.

CIS administration

The CIS system relies on interaction with other Revenue systems for maintenance of its records. The essential requirements for maintenance of a CIS record for a contractor are the existence of

• a record on the SA or COTAX system for the contractor

• a record on the Employer Business Service (EBS) relating to a P(SC) or XP scheme for the contractor.

Since a government department or agency is an employer there will already be a P scheme in operation for its employees, an EBS reference will therefore exist. If the government department or agency is now engaging subcontractors the scheme type will need changing to ‘PSC’ in order that a contractor record is created on CIS

However, government departments and agencies are not routinely allocated UTRs and SA records. Special arrangements were made, therefore, to allocate UTRs centrally. This was done by South Wales Area (Service), formerly PD2, which set up SA records for all government departments and agencies.

If you receive any enquiries about setting up a SA record for a new government department or agency you should now liaise with the LLP Team Operations to ensure that the necessary SA records are created and / or ceased who will then notify the NICEO of the new SA reference to be entered on to the EBS record.