Other news in brief

The Court of Appeal has overturned the 2019 Upper Tribunal decision (thereby restoring the 2016 First-tier Tribunal (FTT) decision) in Ingenious Games LLP & OR’s v Revenue & Customs and ruled that the FTT was entitled to find that certain film partnerships were carrying on a trade with a view to profit and thus their members were entitled to claim loss relief against general income (sideways loss relief). Similarly, the FTT decision that the computer games partnership was not trading, was confirmed. For these film partnerships, the impact of this decision is limited as previous decisions had found that the partnership’s expenditure was almost exclusively capital in nature. As such, the partnership members will still not obtain the anticipated amount of sideways loss relief.

The Government is introducing a new requirement for large businesses to notify HMRC where they have adopted an uncertain tax treatment in a tax return from 1 April 2022. The aim of the measure is to reduce the legal interpretation portion of the ‘Tax Gap’ (£4.9 billion per the latest estimate). Kevin Elliott, Director in KPMG UK’s tax disputes team shared his thoughts on this in a Q&A with Tom Inchley of Lexis PSL (first published by Lexis PSL on 4 August 2021 and reproduced with permission).