TC09630 - [2025] UKFTT 01071 (TC)

Fecha: 21-Ago-2025

The Form

The Form

22.

Attached to Mr Di Lellio’s Notice of Appeal to the Tribunal was a template Inland Revenue form (Footnote: ¹) headed “Notice of appeal and application to postpone payment” relating to Mr Di Lellio (“the Form”).

23.

The Form had been completed in manuscript and included the following:

(1)

Under “Notice of appeal – assessments” it lists the three years 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16, together with the amounts referred to in Officer Fowler’s letter of 7 December 2018 which were assessed on 30 January 2019.

(2)

Under “reasons for appeal”, the words “Mr Di Lellio did not receive the rents assessed by HMRC”.

(3)

Mr Cooke’s signature, followed by the date of 28 December 2018. The last figure of that date has been crossed out and replaced by a “9”, so it reads “2019”.

24.

The change of date was unexplained. As noted, there was no witness statement from Mr Cooke and he did not attend the hearing. We accepted that a person might mistakenly misdate a form in January, when a new year had just begun, but we found it improbable that he would do so December, at the very end of a year. On the balance of probabilities, we found that the Form had been completed and dated in December 2018, and subsequently amended. Mr Sanders agreed this was the most likely scenario.

25.

No covering letter was attached to the Form and it was not referred to in any of the correspondence between the parties; instead, it emerged for the first time as an attachment to the Notice of Appeal. We find as a fact that the Form was never sent to Officer Fowler, because had that been the position, it is not credible that neither she nor Mr Cooke would have referred to it in the course of the lengthy correspondence between the parties.