HMRC is sending out letters to overseas individuals living and working in the UK to establish whether they are resident in the country and should be  paying tax to HMRC, tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg has warned.

Paul Haywood-Schiefer, a manager at the firm flagged that HMRC is now targeting individuals with letters asking them to check their residency position before they complete their Tax Returns for the tax year ended 5 April 2020.

Mr Haywood-Schiefer warned this means that they are going to need to look carefully at the UK government’s Statutory Residence Tax (the test that the government uses to define whether a person is resident in the UK for tax purposes or not) to see exactly what their tax residency status is.

“This is not the first nudge letter’ campaign we have seen,” Mr Haywood-Schiefer explained, adding that “there were previous campaigns regarding Swiss investments and then more recently, offshore income and tax gains in general.”

"The main reason for these campaigns is to increase the tax take, and this one comes as the government looks at ways of clawing back billions spent during the current pandemic. The reasons are always the same, trying to flush out people who might not have been completing their returns on the correc...