Customer relationship manager

By Tolley

The following Corporation Tax guidance note by Tolley provides comprehensive and up to date tax information covering:

Customer relationship manager
Risk assessment
Low risk status
Senior accounting officers
Transactional risks
Customer relationship manager
The CRM role
Appointment of a CRM
Dealing with issues
Factual issues
Technical issues
Fraud or negligence
Escalation of an issue
The customer co-ordinator role
Purpose of the customer co-ordinator

A customer relationship manager (CRM) is generally appointed for businesses dealt with by either the Large Business Service (LBS) or Local Compliance (Large and Complex) (L&C). Generally, a CRM is allocated when the turnover of the business exceeds £200 million. A customer co-ordinator is allocated when the turnover is between £30 and £200 million. HMRC guidance regarding the CRM and customer co-ordinator roles can be found on HMRC’s website .

Risk assessment

It is HMRC policy to classify its largest businesses as either low or not low risk, although occasionally expressions such as ‘intermediate’ can be encountered. A business risk review is undertaken for this purpose. See the Business risk review guidance note for further details of this process.

This means that the largest businesses can face rigorous and recurring scrutiny from HMRC if they are not classed as low risk. Conversely, businesses classed as low risk will have the bonus of reduced interventions but will still face the risk review process on a three year cycle and will need to handle their tax affairs with HMRC on a real time basis.

HMRC’s strategy is to focus its limited resources on the areas it perceives to be of highest tax risk, and the interaction with low risk businesses is driven by the business rather than HMRC.

Low risk status

HMRC’s definition of low risk is a company which has an open and transparent relationship with HMRC, is effectively managing its own tax compliance risk, and which HMRC trusts will not engage in tax planning that does not support genuine commercial activity. See TCRM2100.

HMRC expects businesses classed as low risk to inform it in real time of significant transactions where: