The boss of a Burnley construction firm has been hit with a banning order after the firm falsely claimed more than £110k through a Government tax scheme.
Penka Vasileva was responsible for Penka Services Ltd when it fraudulently claimed the six figure sum through the Construction Industry Scheme . The CIS allows contractors to deduct money from a subcontractor’s payments to pass it directly to HM Revenue and Customs . These sums then count as advance payments towards the subcontractor’s tax and National Insurance in a system which is designed to designed to increase revenue collected from the construction industry. In 2019, PSL registered with the scheme as both a contractor and a sub-contractor.The firm then submitted a CIS repayment claim to HMRC relating to the period ending February 5, 2020, based on payments allegedly received from a third party contractor company.
When HMRC investigated the CIS claim, it could find no record of payments to the company named on the application. Likewise, no payments could be found between that company and the other firm which actually received the money from PSL. It was then found that the company named on the form had gone bust in December 2019 and as a result of its findings HMRC froze the bank account of the other firm. It has successfully seized funds from that account while Vasileva, who was born in Bulgaria, never delivered any books or records to back up the claim.