- IHT accounts may now be signed electronically. This measure was introduced during the pandemic and looks like it will be kept. Further details of this are given in HMRC guide to completing form IHT400, which can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inheritance-tax-inheritance-tax-account-iht400
Unfortunately, the IHT account itself must still be sent in to HMRC in hard copy.
- Where estates are deemed complex and are being dealt with by one of the IHT department's tax specialists (usually referred to as 'the compliance team'), it is now sometimes possible to switch to email communication. This should be requested every time, and approval will need to be given by all executors/administrators. Where the case worker agrees, his can lead to huge time savings.
Teething problems at the new Probate Service
Anyone who has been dealing with probates for more than a few years laments that they miss the days of regional Probate Registries. Each Probate Registry was manned by a small team of specialists, who could be contacted over the phone, and for professionals in particular this meant having any queries dealt with quickly. For both costs and efficiency reasons, most regional Probate Registries have now been closed, and probate services centralised into the Probate Service. Most probate applications are now dealt with by non-specialists, and this means that where circumstances are out of the ordinary, this can make the application process difficult.
Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, now that the new centralised system has had time to bed in, the process is quite straightforward (though still slower than when applications were dealt with by regional Probate Registries). The vast majority of applications can be made online, with any original documents required (such as the original Will or any codicils) posted to a scanning centre in Harlow.
The probate application cannot be submitted until 20 working days have passed from submission of the IHT account to HMRC, but once it has been made, if everything goes smoothly and no documents are lost, then the grant may be issued as soon as one or two weeks after submission. This is a vast improvement on the timeline as it was early during the pandemic, which could stretch to two to three months.
Where issues arise is where documents are missing, which could be for a number of reasons, such as:
