Free Traffic Legal Advice

If you ignore Smart you will get letters from debt collectors followed by a legal Letter of Claim.
If you appeal within their deadlines, they will reject your appeal and allow you to appeal to the IAS who will also reject your appeal, followed by debt collectors and a Letter of Claim.
In either case you will eventually need to file an appeal to a court claim, so if you appeal now you have the basis for a subsequent appeal and set out your position.

It would seem that both outcomes are the same?

By appealing now you demonstrate that you have attempted to avoid this going to court, even if your attempt is unsuccessful. If you ignore, you can’t.

Hence why normal advice here is to follow the process rather than ignore.

They can still take you to court, but the point is that by engaging and disputing the debt you've done a few things:

• Shown to Smart that you're potentially not an easy target
• Set out your grounds of dispute, which will eventually form the basis of your defence
• Shown to the court that you have behaved reasonably and taken steps to resolve the issue
• If one of your appeals is accepted, avoided court (and several months of paperwork) altogether

Court should be seen as a last resort, and judges expect litigants to have behaved reasonably - this includes taking steps to dispute the matter with the claimant before it reaches the court. If you're unfortunate enough for this to go all the way to a court hearing, then if you've disputed the matter at every stage, you potentially look a lot better to the judge than someone who has buried their head in the sand and ignored everything, forcing the matter to end up in court.