Content
Pot and kettle
No more stealth
Pensions hit
A place in the sun
Ready or not...
Nice motor
Making allowances
Good times, bad times
Tax-free checkup
Three square meals
Funny question
Dividend rules OK?
Too good to be true?
Pay my friend
Early EIS
Mind the halfpennies
Just the ticket
Flat rate changes
Foreign Service
This year, next year
Partial exemption
Penalties
Compliance checks
Under their eye
Howzat?
Know your rights
Discipline
Don't be mean
Redundancy
Two sorts of absence
Warranties
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If you sell something for 96p, what's the VAT? At the current rate of 3/23, it's 13p - 12.52p rounds up. If you sell the same thing for 95p, the VAT is only 12p - 12.39p rounds down. That means your customer pays a penny less, but you keep the same amount - 83p either way. This may not seem like a big issue, but the European Court of Justice has had to rule on two disputes about rounding calculations and VAT in the last year. Wetherspoons, the pub chain, thought that they should be allowed to round everything down - after all, 13p is too much tax if it ought to be 12.52p, and the state shouldn't be allowed to extort even a halfpenny too much. The judges thought that member states should be allowed to set their own rules on this, as long as the rules were reasonable - and requiring traders to round halfpennies up wasn't unreasonable. So no change for Wetherspoons: but it's a reminder that anyone who sells a lot of small items to the public should think about the prices they charge. A penny off is small change to the customer, but it might be a penny off the VAT instead of a penny off the trader's income.  |