When you work with an accountancy practice you are likely to need them to submit returns on your behalf whether it is payroll, VAT or Corporation Tax. You should not share your Gateway log in with them and while adding them as a ‘team member’ is a work around we have seen it is not good practice. Your accountant or bookkeeper will be registered as an ‘agent’ and you will therefore be able to give them permission to submit these returns on your behalf.

The quickest way to notify HMRC that a practice like Holy Brook Associates is your agent is to use your Government Gateway account.  If you are a client please do contact us for any help you need, but here are the instructions to add your accountant as an agent..

Please have to hand:

• Your Government Gateway username and password
• Your Agent’s ID (if you are a Holy Brook client, please just ask us for this).

You can follow this process for any tax that you wish us to manage (Including Corporation Tax, Making Tax Digital for VAT, self assessment, PAYE for Employers), and you will need to make sure you tick the taxes you wish us to manage for you.

Note that you may sometimes have more than one Gateway account so may need to use a different username and password for some of them.

• Click HMRC’s Gateway login page, enter your username and password and ‘Sign in’
• If necessary enter your access code
• Once logged in at the top of the page click ‘Manage Account’

• Under ‘Tax Agents’ click ‘Add, view or change tax agents’
• Select the tax you wish to from the list and click ‘Continue’
• If you have an existing agent to remove: click ‘Manage agents’ then click ‘Remove’ then ‘Remove agent’ then ‘Return to list of taxes and schemes’

Alongside the relevant service click ‘Add agent’

Enter the Agent ID in the box provided and click ‘Continue’

You will see a declaration – check the details are right and then click ‘Add agent’

Finally, you will see a confirmation screen showing that you have added your agent

Repeat if necessary for other taxes.