Commissioners for Revenue and Customs v Lansdowne Partners Ltd Partnership [2010] EWHC 2582 (Ch), [2010] All ER (D) 183 (Oct)
The question to be asked when considering discovery assessments and s 29 of the Taxes Management Act 1970 was whether an officer of the commissioners had sufficient information to make a decision whether to raise an additional assessment. The statutory reference was to a hypothetical officer rather than a real individual. The hypothetical officer had to be endowed with knowledge of elementary arithmetic, some knowledge of tax law, and some tax law, all of which he would apply to the prescribed sources of information. The test of whether an officer could reasonably have been expected to be aware of an actual insufficiency was an objective test. “Awareness” was the officer’s awareness of an actual insufficiency in the self-assessment in question, rather than an awareness that he should do something to check whether there was an insufficiency. The sources of information referred to in s 29(6) of the Act were the only sources of information to be taken into account in deciding whether an officer ought reasonably to have been
