The 5th Coronavirus support grant for the self-employed is live to claim from late July through to the end of September. There are two elements – firstly the need to consider the criteria to ensure eligible to claim in the first place, and secondly, the amount claimable depends on a comparison of turnover in a 12-month period from certain dates in April 2020.
The criteria are not hugely different from the previous claim and can be found here.
The turnover criteria is new though – HMRC guidance is found here. Unfortunately, there is a real problem in trying to make the guidance “simple” and what happens in real world situations. HMRC seem to think that every self-employed business has a 12-month accounting period to 31 March for instance.
With previous COVID grants, some information and guidance has been extremely late in being delivered, and one only received some clarification late on the Friday night before claims went live the following Monday leading to software houses and developers working all the weekend to fix their calculators!
Unfortunately, it does look like this 5th grant may run a similar course, and some of the information in the HMRC guidance as at 16th July is simply incorrect or misleading!
We would advise that you contact us to obtain figures for the turnover tests. As with other SEISS grants, accountants are not able to make the claims on behalf of their clients.
