* You are viewing the archive for August, 2009

HMRC attacks construction industry workers

Towards the end of July HM Revenue & Customs published one of their famous consultation documents. I say “famous” because we have had quite a number of them in the past couple of years, and for the most part HMRC takes little or no notice of the opinions of tax professionals and other interested parties before doing for the most part what they always intended to do. The exception to all this was the major changes in the taxation treatment of trusts from April 2008, where HMRC should have had a consultation, but chose not to, blind-siding everyone with an … Continue Reading

HMRC and customer service

I wrote recently about Government and in particular HMRC disenfranchising the non-technical population. It is a sad situation, and it means that some perfectly intelligent people and in particular those of an older age group, or perhaps those who work with their hands have to employ people like me to do tasks with which they could have coped if dealing in paper.Because there is almost no one in HMRC with whom the ordinary population can speak who actually knows anything about tax, taxpayers just have to grub along or pay someone else. It gets worse as demonstrated … Continue Reading

Stirring the pot

I watched with interest the interview on the Accountancy Age website with Dave Hartnett, Permanent Secretary for Tax about the New Disclosure Opportunity (NDO). To quote HMRC, “the NDO will allow people with unpaid taxes linked to offshore accounts or assets to settle their tax liabilities at a favourable penalty rate. It will run from the 1st Sept 2009 until 12 March 2010.If you have unpaid tax linked to an offshore account or asset to declare, to benefit from the terms of NDO you will need to notify us AND disclose (tell us the details, … Continue Reading