Nick Braun/taxcafe

[perlpilot]

Thanks guys. I'll probably get the property tax booklet from them. I'm in the same boat as everyone else (contracting in the UK, all the ltd's income is in the UK) so therefore I probably won't bother getting the overseas book.

Plan B is going to go into effect soon thought, with the first step being buying some land overseas somewhere, perhaps back home.

I'm sure the JS developers who work 95% of the time in France and only come to London to line up new contracts are able do take advantage of that. But that's not my situation at the moment.

[meridian]

Nick Braun/taxcafe

I can't see HMRC putting up with this. There are a huge number of non-domiciles working in the UK, returning home most weekends and this implies they could all work tax free. No way HMRC would accept it. This is as illusory as having your income as "loans".

Just simply paying into a foreign bank account doesn't make it non-taxable. This is a story incidentally I've heard often and used by contractors to avoid tax in several European countries where it clearly hasn't worked.

The income is generated when the client pays the money and it doesn't matter where this money is transferred to. That would be the starting point for HMRC. Sure, in the same way you can justify offshore loans it would have to be all fought through the courts, but really does the OP want to do that?

I agree in the sense that theoretically it might be accepted by a court after fighting it through several appeals, but then you could say this about onshore contractors battling with HMRC on offshore loans. In other words the inevitable legal costs just outweigh any tenuous potential benefit.

They can put up with it, and they do. Remember that there are two entities on the receiving end here - the contractor's ltd co, which is legally required to pay UK tax on all income earned anywhere as a domiciled and resident taxpayer. And the non-dom director, who is legally required to pay tax on UK-sourced income (such as the ltd's salary and dividends) but not overseas income (such as interest from an overseas savings account) as a non-domiciled but resident UK taxpayer.

For a standard contractor there's little to be gained, but someone with substantial overseas interests would only pay tax on UK generated income.


Edit: just saw ASB said the same thing using only a few words.....