Autumn 2009 Newsletter


Contents

Tin Hats Required

Trust In Money

Beat The Hike

Expenses A - Z

On The Job Training

Pay In Lieu

Pension Pot

Opportunity Knocks

ISAy ISAy ISAy

Fair Exchange?

Scrappage

The Value Of IR35

Loss And Profit

End Of The Holidays

Da Vinci Or PAYE?

Last Orders

Foreign Peril

Quadruple Entry

It's A Date

All Change

Good Health!

O Lucky Man!

Be Prepared

An Inspector Calls

SA Or Not SA?

Now You're Asking

I Only Work Here

You Want It When?

Dirty Laundry?

No Smoke Without Fire

Corporate Manslaughter

The Value Of IR35


If you have a personal service company you will know all about IR35 - the rules brought in to try to squeeze PAYE and NIC out of people who work through companies. In the view of the taxman, such people are often "disguising employment" and should be taxed like anyone else with a job. The rules have caused a lot of grief since they were introduced 10 years ago.

Now the Professional Contractors Group has used the Freedom of Information Act to make HMRC reveal how much tax IR35 has raised. Between 2002/03 and 2007/08, it directly earned just £9.2m in total. When it was issued in 1999, HMRC expected the measure to generate £220m per year in NICs alone.

It is probably too much to expect this government - or the next government - to learn from this and think twice before introducing over-complicated measures to counter tax avoidance that probably is not nearly as great as they suspect. We'll still have to deal with the complications that IR35 has caused for years to come.