HMRC’s Crucial Step into the Future for EMI Schemes

Today we received an email from HMRC. Specifically, an email agreeing a valuation of a company for an Enterprise Management Incentive (“EMI”)scheme.

What’s the big deal?

For decades, agreeing valuations with HMRC for employee share schemes has been a grind of hand written forms, heaps of documents being sent by post, wet ink signatures and chasing down written responses in HMRC’s slow and centralised postal system. You could wait weeks for a valuation agreement, but our suspicion was that share valuations were being approved in a few days – with the rest of the time taken up by paper and post-based processes.

It’s been five years since Sarah Anderson, an RM2 director, helped draft recommendations to HMRC on tax simplification for tax advantaged employee share schemes. Included in those recommendations was a shift to more online processes.

HMRC’s new Employment Related Securities (“ERS”) portal got plenty of fanfare (and plenty of criticism when it didn’t quite work) but this shift to email responses has been just as big a deal. To us, it shows us to a shift in mindset at HMRC, towards more modern, more immediate dialogue with taxpayers and their advisors.

Valuing shares is often a crucial step for a company in setting up an option scheme to motivate employees. We’re very happy for anything that makes this process simpler and quicker!

If you would like to discuss any of your employee share plan requirements we would be happy to talk to you. Please give us a call on 0208 949 5522 or email enquiries@rm2.co.uk