Penalty appeals
A penalty notice is not always the last word
£9.99 a letter on any plan, including the free watchdog.
Two very different letters arrive with the word penalty on them. HMRC charges for a Company Tax Return it asked for and did not get. Companies House charges for accounts that arrived after the deadline, and doubles it if last year was late too. Both have a clock on them, and most people either pay without looking or write a letter that was never going to work. Photograph the notice and we read it, check it against your own filing record and against the public register, and tell you plainly whether there is anything to argue — including when there is not.
See a penalty appeal working · 1m 9s
We look before you pay
The check is free and it happens first. We read the notice, pull your company's filing history from the register, and compare both with the returns we hold for you. You see what we found — the dates, the amounts, the filings — and what it does or does not support, before there is any question of paying for a letter.
What actually counts as grounds
For HMRC, a company that was dormant for tax that period (outside the charge to Corporation Tax) has a real route: the letter asks HMRC to record the period as dormant, withdraw its request for a return and cancel the penalty. For Companies House, dormancy is never a ground — but a penalty can still be wrong on its own facts. The register may show the accounts arrived on time, or arrived early enough for a lower band, or that last year was not late at all and the doubling should not apply. Exceptional circumstances, the one ground Companies House does publish, is yours to assert and ours to write up properly.
The letter is written from your facts, not from a model
Every sentence in the letter is either something you ticked on the form or something our records already hold. The templates are code, checked by tests, and no model writes a word of the letter. It goes out in the company's name, signed by a director, from the company's registered office as printed on it, with your chosen reply address. Our name appears nowhere on it.
Print it, or let us post it
The finished letter is yours to download, print and send. If you would rather not, we hand it to our printing and postage contractor, who prints it in the UK and posts it first class the same working day. You watch it move from written to posted in your Appeals Centre. Ordinary post carries no signature, so we can tell you it went and when — the reply is what confirms it landed.
One place to watch it, for as long as it takes
An appeal is not a moment, it is two or three months. Every appeal you have sits in your Appeals Centre with the stage it has reached, the dates that matter, the letter it answers and the company it belongs to — so you are never hunting for which notice started what. Six weeks after we post, we ask you what came back, because HMRC and Companies House reply to you and not to us. An outcome we displayed without asking would be one we invented. And if nothing has come back yet, you say so and we ask again rather than filing it away as settled.
What it deliberately will not do
It will not tell you an appeal will succeed, because nobody can. It will not invent a reason: if your record does not support a ground, the page says so and tells you what to do instead. It will not argue that a return was never due once HMRC has asked for one — that argument loses. And it is never sent from an address of ours, because your reply belongs at your own address.
Questions, answered
- Will this get my penalty cancelled?
- Nobody can tell you that, and anyone who does is guessing. What we can do is establish whether a ground exists in your own records and the public register, put it in front of you before you pay, and write it up in the form the letter needs to take. The decision is HMRC's or Companies House's.
- Companies House says my company being dormant is no excuse. Is that right?
- Yes, and we say the same for free. A dormant company has exactly the same accounts deadline as a trading one, and Companies House rejects dormancy as a reason every time. That is precisely why the check matters: the useful question is not whether you were dormant, but whether the penalty itself is right.
- How long have I got?
- An HMRC penalty carries a 30-day window from the date printed on the notice, and the notice is definitive. A Companies House appeal is considered only once the accounts have actually been delivered, so filing comes first. A late appeal can still be made to HMRC with a reason for the delay, and the letter asks them to accept it.
- What does it cost?
- £9.99 for the letter, on any plan, including the free watchdog. The check that tells you whether there is anything worth arguing costs nothing. An accountant asked to do the same work typically starts around £150.
- Where do I track it once it's posted?
- In your Appeals Centre, which lists every appeal on the account with the stage it has reached, when it was posted, whether it was delivered, and the letter it came from. The appeal record links back to that letter and the letter links forward to the appeal, so you can move between the two without losing your place.
Keep reading
Photograph the notice and find out where you stand.
The check is free — it needs a free account, nothing more — and takes about half a minute. You only pay if there is a letter worth sending.