🇬🇧UK Family Office Records and Tax Evidence

Concept

For UK residence and offshore exposure, records are legal evidence, not administration. A family office file should prove the facts that decide residence, source, situs, treaty position, trust attribution, company control and foreign tax credit. Since 6 April 2025 the system turns on residence rather than domicile, so the count of UK-resident years is itself a fact the file must evidence. The UK rules turn on factual tests, so the file either reconciles those facts or it does not.

The Statutory Residence Test still depends on days and ties under RDR3, and its thresholds are unchanged for 2026/27; foreign income runs through the Self Assessment foreign pages (SA106); account data is exchanged under the framework HMRC describes in IEIM400080. The same day count now drives the four-year foreign income and gains relief and the long-term-resident test for inheritance tax, and the data HMRC already receives has to match the return. A record system that cannot tie those together is not fit for a mobile family.

An HMRC enquiry tests the evidence, not the label. A technically correct residence, FIG or treaty position fails commercially if the bank file, the trustee file and the tax return hold different facts. Build the ownership map, the residence calendar and the source-of-funds trail before the return goes in — reconstructing them after a letter arrives is the weakest position.

The 2025 residence regime

Domicile stopped driving UK tax on 6 April 2025. Income tax and capital gains now follow the residence test, and the old remittance basis is closed. A qualifying new resident, someone who was non-UK resident for the ten tax years before arrival, can claim full relief on foreign income and gains for the first four tax years of UK residence; after that, worldwide income is taxed in full.

Inheritance tax moved to the same logic. A long-term resident, UK resident for at least ten of the previous twenty tax years, is within IHT on worldwide assets, and that exposure trails departure by three to ten years depending on how long the person was resident. Domicile, deemed domicile and the formerly-domiciled-resident category are gone.

Former remittance-basis users have a narrow window. The Temporary Repatriation Facility lets them designate pre-April-2025 foreign income and gains and pay a charge of 12% on the designated amount in 2025/26 and 2026/27, rising to 15% in 2027/28, against headline rates of up to 45%; the money need not be brought to the UK while the facility runs, and once the charge is paid it can be remitted later with no further UK tax. Every designation, and the pool it draws from, has to be documented while the facility is open.

Overseas workday relief survives in reworked form: it runs across the same four-year window, no longer depends on keeping the pay offshore, and is capped each year at the lower of £300,000 and 30% of qualifying employment income, so the office must split employment days between UK and overseas duties and keep the contracts and payroll that support the apportionment. The relief is worthless without the day-level evidence behind it.

What the file must prove

The operating record set covers founders, spouses, children, trustees, protectors, investment companies, bank accounts, portfolios and advisers across jurisdictions. It must answer who owns what, who controls what, where decisions are made, where days are spent, which taxes were paid abroad, which returns were filed, which self-certifications were given, which trust benefits were received, and which documents support source of funds.

The typical ownership map the file has to reconcile, and the two channels through which the same facts reach HMRC:

Why fragmentation fails

The recurring failure is scattered evidence: travel data with assistants, trust records with trustees, brokerage data with banks, residence opinions with advisers. HMRC or a bank sees the inconsistency before the family office reconstructs the file. An adviser opinion is not evidence on its own — it needs the source documents that prove the facts it relies on.

How the record set is kept

Each of those records carries an operating requirement of its own. The ownership map is indexed by person, entity, asset, account and tax year. The SRT day log and the family residence calendar are updated through the year rather than at filing. The source-of-funds memorandum covers the origin of the wealth and each material transaction.

The rest are defined by what they have to agree with. The income and gains register reconciles to the return and to CRS-reported data; the CRS and FATCA self-certifications stay consistent with the residence position; and the company governance and trust distribution records are held linked to the personal tax file.

Regulation and retention periods

UK rules name expressly which records a company keeps and for how long. The register of members is kept by the company itself, while directors, PSCs and registered charges are reflected at Companies House. Accounting records under the Companies Act 2006 are kept for at least three years from the date they are made for a private company and six for a public one; failure is a criminal offence by every officer in default, punishable by a fine or, on indictment, up to two years' imprisonment (s 389). For a family office that is the floor. The tax retention duty itself is short — under TMA 1970 s 12B an individual keeps the records behind a return until the first anniversary of the 31 January filing date (the fifth anniversary where there is a trade, profession or business), or until an open enquiry closes — but HMRC can assess up to 4 years after the end of the tax year, 6 years for careless and 20 years for deliberate behaviour (ss 34 and 36), and 12 years where the lost tax involves an offshore matter or transfer, unless HMRC already held overseas information, such as CRS data, from which it could reasonably have assessed in time (s 36A). Supporting documents are therefore held for as long as those assessment windows stay open.

Since 2024–2025 the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) has changed how corporate records are kept at all. From 4 March 2024 a company must hold a registered email address and an "appropriate" registered office — a physical address in the jurisdiction of incorporation. From 18 November 2025 identity verification at Companies House became mandatory: new directors and PSCs verify immediately, existing ones during a transitional year to 18 November 2026, and a new PSC reports the identifier within 14 days. From the same date a company no longer keeps its registers of directors and PSCs locally — that data sits centrally at Companies House.

Above the corporate layer sit the anti-money-laundering requirements. Under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 a bank and any regulated intermediary keep customer due diligence and transaction records for five years after the relationship ends and then delete personal data; the outer limit is ten years. Those periods set the rhythm for the whole file: CRS and FATCA self-certifications, beneficial-ownership documents and source-of-funds evidence must outlive any single return and match what has already gone into automatic exchange.

The direction of travel is settled: ownership and control data is being pulled into state registers, identity verification is becoming the norm, and crypto-assets now enter automatic exchange under CARF: UK cryptoasset service providers collect data from 1 January 2026 and file the first reports with HMRC by 31 May 2027. The more transparent the surrounding environment, the faster a divergence shows up between what was declared, what was exchanged and what the documents actually prove — and the more an unreconciled file costs.

Common mistakes

• Treating a document vault as sufficient without classifying records against legal positions.
• Relying on a residence calendar alone while company, trust and bank evidence is missing.
• Keeping adviser opinions without the underlying source documents.
• Letting bank self-certifications drift out of line with the tax return.
• Holding company records separately from personal records when owner-level rules depend on company facts.

Evidence in practice

Take a family that moves to the UK in 2025 after a decade abroad. For four years the file has to show the arrival date, each year's SRT result, and the foreign income and gains relieved under the four-year FIG claim. From year five the same family is taxed on worldwide income, and once it crosses ten resident years the worldwide estate falls within inheritance tax. The records that prove the four-year relief are the same records that later prove the IHT clock, so an office that keeps them as one continuous ledger avoids rebuilding the history twice.

If the same family used the remittance basis before 2025, the file also has to identify the pre-April-2025 pools and record each designation made against them under the repatriation facility. Those entries close after 2027/28, and an undocumented pool cannot be cleaned at the reduced rate once the window shuts.

Advisor trigger

A family office manager and accountant can run routine record-keeping when the structure is stable and the facts are clean. A UK tax lawyer should be engaged before a move to the UK, before a major transaction, when ownership or trust records cannot be reconciled, or when an HMRC enquiry tests the residence, source-of-funds or trust position.