[2024] UKUT 00436 (TCC)

An important point is that the FTT did not rely on the notes of the Applicant’s meetings with HMRC on 15 March 2017 and 9 August 2018 against him except at [76](4) of the Decision so their relevance to the ultimate findings was minimal, although I accept it was material.

Nonetheless, the FTT was entitled to rely on HMRC’s minutes of both those meetings. Again, the documents were served upon the Applicant in advance of the hearing and if he wished to challenge their accuracy he had a reasonable opportunity to do so prior to and at the hearing. There is no record of him challenging their accuracy at the hearing before the FTT or giving any evidence explaining the matters he now raises as being inaccurately recorded.

The Applicant has provided no proper reason for saying that that he did not have an opportunity to challenge the minutes during the hearing. Furthermore, there is strong support in the Decision for the fact that the minutes of the meetings were sent to him by HMRC for his approval and that he had an opportunity to challenge them at the relevant time which he did not take. For example, the Decision sets out at [17] that copies of the minutes of the 2017 meeting were sent to him or his representative to approve or confirm and that in the absence of response they would be assumed not to be disputed. It does not appear that the Applicant and his representative ever disputed the minutes at the relevant time.

After the hearing before me the Applicant sent me documents headed ‘Correction of HMRC Notes of Meeting 1 and 2’ which he says he had sent to the FTT. Even if he did challenge the accuracy of the minutes of the meetings in writing before the hearing at the FTT took place, it does not appear he challenged them during the hearing at the FTT. In any event, even if the corrections in these documents do indeed represent what was said at the meetings, they do not undermine the FTT’s only material finding on the minutes at [76(4)].

At no point in the corrections documents does the Applicant say that he lived at Heathcroft Crescent, as he later said in his witness statement, nor that HMRC was wrong to record that he said he did not live there at either meetings. Even if the FTT should have taken into account of the Applicant’s corrections, there is no relevant challenge by the Applicant to the FTT’s material finding that he said at the meeting with HMRC that he did not live at the property and this was inconsistent with what he later said in the statement to the FTT.

The challenges that the Applicant makes to the notes at (i) and (j) do not undermine any of the findings relied upon by the FTT in respect of the notes of the meetings.