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Capital allowances

I enjoyed reading “Just a thought…” on capital allowances (Taxation 8 October 2015). I specialise purely in capital allowances and can confirm that there is still considerable ignorance and vast amounts of allowances are being lost. The article implies that this may affect only smaller firms of lawyers but it applies to the very large firms as well. In fact it is almost an inverse ratio.

In smaller firms of lawyers and accounting firms practitioners generally have all-round knowledge and experience. In the larger firms knowledge is much more specialised and many property lawyers have little understanding of capital allowances and less interest. Also their separate tax teams are seldom involved nor instructed to give specific capital allowances advice. As a result they simply replay the responses to the capital allowances questions in section 32.

I recently reviewed a...