[2025] UKUT 201 (AAC)

Those circumstances also do not amount to the appellant choosing not to provide further information.

The 24 May 2022 email from the accountants cited at paragraph 31 above was sent to the First-tier Tribunal. “We can provide this” suggests that the accountants were waiting to be told that yes, they should do so. As paid representatives (although not lawyers), they would – by collating and supplying additional materials to the First-tier Tribunal – be incurring costs which it was reasonable to expect they would pass on to the client: a client already in a “large deficit” and risking going out of business, according to the evidence before the First-tier Tribunal.

It was not unreasonable to wait for the First-tier Tribunal to take them up on that offer. As mentioned above, the tribunal never did so, on what is before the Upper Tribunal. Nor did the First-tier Tribunal ever tell the appellant (even in the decision) what specific financial information was needed and was considered lacking. It was inaccurate to characterise what the appellant did, in those circumstances, as a choice not to supply the information to the tribunal at all. It was a choice not to supply information unless and until the tribunal said it wanted or needed it, which never happened on what is before the Upper Tribunal.