TRS / Agent Services Account Catch 22

Help! As HMRC are determined to keep passing me on until I have spoken to every single one of them (and the Trusts line keeps cutting me off!), I have yet another TRS question.

A (hopefully late) stage of the process to create an Agent Services Account for the TRS requires us to provide the UTR of a current client for whom we are registered agents “so we can confirm who you are”. As we do not do self assessment tax returns and just want to register trusts, we don’t have any, but answering “I cannot provide either of these details” just leads to a suggestion that we sign in with “a different Government Gateway user ID that you use for a client that has authorised you”. Sadly we don’t have a stash of gateway IDs.

Am I right that HMRC won’t let you apply for an ASA online if you are a new SA agent and are have not registered any actual clients on paper? (we have a code). If so, has anybody (presumably solicitors rather than accountants) found the person/team at HMRC that can resolve this? It’s presumably a problem for lots of different services that use the same gateway.

Thanks in advance.

Andrew Goodman
Osborne Clarke LLP

Andrew that’s a very interesting question. I would be interested to hear the views of others.
In a former life I did once register as an agent for myself because it was quicker to speak to HMRC using the ADL (agents dedicated line) and you got a more sensible answer than by risking the general public number. That was a totally different time…
Maxine

I think your firm should write to HMRC Trusts, especially because, unfairly, its name has a bit of clout behind it as well as merit in your complaint. One of my clients had a framed letter on his office wall and I asked him why because it came from the firm where I was articled and seemed anodyne in content. He said that it was a true rarity: a polite letter from X & Co! I do not recommend contacting the Law Society not least because they operate on a geological timescale.

I think HMRC will respond favourably to firmly direct but polite letter. They have a keen sense of their own self-interest and self-preservation and, given all they have said about raising the standards of agents, I doubt that they would see it as a good look to be seen denying, in effect, a taxpayer’s right to choose a representative of sound reputation. My experience in writing to them (and I was invariably a gloomy prophet not honoured in his own land) is that where they might otherwise look bad in public they will be accommodating if they can be. They have said that there are some things they can’t change in TRS, like making the trustee “claim” the trust before instructing an agent, presumably related to the software design for the online process. But this seems more like yet another glitch which no one foresaw and should have. It may be viewed more like their administrative decision to allow a trust to to ignore a long dormant UTR and say it hasn’t got one.

Jack Harper

Firstly we had to change our SRA authorisation to allow for us to provide tax advice (limited in its extent by our retainer), then with current director DBS checks and confirmation of SRA authorisation, we had to write to HMRC (by post only) with required regulatory information, tax details for the directors and copies of the DBS checks and SRA authorisation. Then we received a letter from HMRC with our agent code. Using this alongside our Agent ID, our account reference number, and a new separate government gateway account reference (yes, 3 new additional HMRC references to curate) created for the firm just for the agent services account (so different to the agent account we user for SDLT, and different to other government gateway accounts we have) we were eventually able to enjoy the huge reward of regsitering a client’s trust. We can also authorise members of the team to do likewise. I am not sure whether we will regsiter enough trusts to cover the significant additional compliance and administration cost involved…It was a tortuous process and although I thought it was important to be able to regsiter our clients’ trusts, I can quite see that delegating this task to the accountants is the easier option. We didn’t have to give the UTR of a client who had authorised us - unless I have forgotten that in the blur of all the other requirements!