Wickerman
07-06-2006, 14:53 PM
We have a letting agent that the IR has finally caught up to. The IR (Well, HMCR) have asked them for details of all landlords and gross rents received last tax year).
The agent has said that to comply with this legislation (that dates back to the 70s but is little used, until now, apparently) they have to develop a database to track the rents received and have to allocate resources to fulfill these requests.
As a result, they want to make an additional charge of £35 + VAT per property for every year the IR want to request the information for. At the moment it is just two of our properties so £70 + VAT.
Does anybody have any experience of this sort of situation, and what would be the norm? I do not mind paying up once, but if it is going to be an extra annual charge I would be looking at swapping agents!!!!
Incidentally I manage properties for other landlords and all my income tracking (and every single aspect of property management) is managed through a web based system. It would take me tops 3 days work to extend the system to systematically pull this information out of the database, and could it squirt it into a CSV file or format it as a printable document as say a PDF file (the database is written in PHP and uses MYSQL as a backend - php has excellent PDF tools that allow you to generate very complex PDF files on the fly). So 3 days initial work to set it up, plus 15 minutes top to generate a list of all the landlords, all the properties, all the gross rents recieved for each tax year. £35 + VAT per house per year requested seems awfully high!!!
The agent has said that to comply with this legislation (that dates back to the 70s but is little used, until now, apparently) they have to develop a database to track the rents received and have to allocate resources to fulfill these requests.
As a result, they want to make an additional charge of £35 + VAT per property for every year the IR want to request the information for. At the moment it is just two of our properties so £70 + VAT.
Does anybody have any experience of this sort of situation, and what would be the norm? I do not mind paying up once, but if it is going to be an extra annual charge I would be looking at swapping agents!!!!
Incidentally I manage properties for other landlords and all my income tracking (and every single aspect of property management) is managed through a web based system. It would take me tops 3 days work to extend the system to systematically pull this information out of the database, and could it squirt it into a CSV file or format it as a printable document as say a PDF file (the database is written in PHP and uses MYSQL as a backend - php has excellent PDF tools that allow you to generate very complex PDF files on the fly). So 3 days initial work to set it up, plus 15 minutes top to generate a list of all the landlords, all the properties, all the gross rents recieved for each tax year. £35 + VAT per house per year requested seems awfully high!!!