Under the terms of HMRC's Property Sales (PS) campaign individual taxpayers were given the opportunity to disclose undeclared capital and income from property. The disclosure deadline was 9 August 2013.

The campaign applies to:

  • Undeclared capital gains made on the disposal of private property including rental property and property abroad.
  • As part of the disclosure any undeclared property income and investment income must also be declared.

This campaign does not apply to:

  • Under-declared profits from businesses which deal in (buy and sell) property
  • Gains made by trusts, partnerships or companies.

Taxpayers may declare other income or gains not covered by the Property Sales campaign under HMRC's voluntary disclosure arrangement

Property Sales Campaign: notification and disclosure

Taxpayers must:

  • Notify HMRC of their intention to take part in this campaign by 9 August 2013
  • Complete their disclosure by 9 September 2013

Disclosure

  • Disclosure is made by completion of one of HMRC's "intelligent" PDF forms.
  • Unfortunately this will not allow you to save information and each field has to be completed before you move to the next page, so you need to have all your details including the tax calculations to hand before you can complete the form.
  • At the time of writing this notice we could not make the form saved to a computer print so disclosure may be quite a time consuming process.
  • Don't blame HMRC for all the malfunctions; Adobe restricts free PDFs.

Penalties

Circumstance Penalty

You have not sent HMRC a return or sent a return showing less tax payable than the correct amount. You were not deliberately trying to keep the information from HMRC

0% of tax due
You started trading, or receiving income from property or have disposed of a property for gain but you have not told HMRC or sent a tax return, you were not deliberately trying to keep the information from HMRC

0% of tax due for 2011/12

10% for earlier years

You deliberately failed to tell HMRC that you had started trading or receiving income from property or had disposed of a property for gain 20% of tax due
You deliberately sent in a return showing less tax payable in order to pay less tax 20% of tax due
You took active steps to conceal your income or gains Penalty tba by HMRC: call 0845 601 8819

Link: HMRC: Property Sale Campaign Guidance

HMRC Help

Points of difficulty or potential confusion

  • Property held in joint names does not automatically create a partnership.
  • Jointly held property is taxed in different ways for married couples

See Joint property elections and Joint property - signpost for an explanation.

Taxpayers may use elections to nominate properties such as second or holiday homes to be exempt from capital gains tax by using a main residence election, see CGT: Main Residence Relief

Contact our Virtual Tax Partner support line for assistance on the above "points of difficulty" or to make a disclosure/check calculations.