Carillion now on HMRC's negligible value list

[Gengulphus]

The subject basically says it all about the actual news, apart from the date: HMRC will accept a claim that Carillion shares had become of negligible value by 15 January 2018, or any later date. See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/negligible-value-agreements - and don't worry that there's a typo in the announcement of Carillion's addition near the top of the list, they've spelt the company name correctly in the actual list entry!

Note that you still have to make the negligible value claim to establish that you can treat the loss as having been realised on a particular date, but I'd guess that anything in your CGT computations that indicated clearly that you intend your Carillion holding to be treated as having become of negligible value by a particular date would be treated as a negligible value claim (that guess is partly based on an article I've read recently about some specific cases to do with whether valid negligible value claims had been made). I think though it will be safer and less likely to produce the possible nuisance of taxman queries to include an explicit "I claim that all my shares in Carillion plc had become of negligible value by <date>" statement in my CGT computations, with a reference to the negligible value list to back up the claim, so that's what I'll be doing.

And note that this in no way forces you to make a negligible value claim for January 15th or any other date or to treat the loss as having occurred then. If the loss was an unwelcome one for the 2017/2018 tax year, for example because it would simply be used up offsetting gains that were untaxed anyway because they were inside your 2017/2018 CGT allowance, just leave their negligible value and the resulting loss unclaimed. If the loss then is welcome in the current 2018/2019 tax year, make a negligible value claim about it in due course, for it having become of negligible value by 6 April 2018 or some later date within the tax year. Or if it's unwelcome for this tax year as well, it can probably be deferred again to the 2019/2020 tax year, and so on. There's no fixed limit to how long a negligible value claim can be deferred in that way, but there is a limit: from the date that the company becomes "dissolved", negligible value claims will cease to be possible and if you haven't already made a valid negligible value claim, you will be stuck with having actually realised the loss on the date of dissolution, no matter how welcome or unwelcome that date is. So it's best to try to find gains you can usefully use the loss against, realise them and make the negligible value claim as soon as reasonably possible - but that probably not urgent: if you look though the list at entries that have got a "dissolved" date against them, you'll see that the time between becoming of negligible value and being dissolved is typically measured in years rather than months, and not all that infrequently in excess of 10 years.

Gengulphus