Inside/outside tax turning into another Loan Charge debacle?

[ShandyDrinker]

Write to your MP by all means, in your own words. They will ignore templated letters (quite rightly imo) but I guarantee you will get a template letter back in due course. And as I said above, UK justice doesn't really do group actions, it has to start with a single litigant, and therein lies the biggest problem.

I agree with Mal's comment here. Having written to and seen my local MP numerous times about the off-payroll rules since the public sector version was first announced, all you are likely to get is a templated letter in return for your troubles, whether from the Treasury or HMRC, depending on the query. As a casual observation over the years, MPs of all parties are mostly indifferent to IR35/off-payroll and in fact a number think it's right that entitled contractors get it stuck to them being the tax dodgers that they all allegedly are. I sincerely hope that this could become a vote losing issue for all parties but until the contracting sector comes together and forms some kind of group that everyone gets behind (crikey, couldn't the PCG or the IPSE be such a vehicle), it'll never happen.

[jamesbrown]

I think I would use HMRC favourite term actually: carelessness. End Client did SDS and sent it to agent, agents failed to apply.

On MP, no, I haven’t written yet. I was (and still am) chasing an answer through another route. But months and got nowhere so far and not for lack of trying. Which is why wondering what next step is, to who, and if it should be co-ordinated. A letter to MP’s would be more powerful if either from a body of some type (IPSE?) or a group of people was my thinking.

Yeah, so I think your situation would not make a very good test case, unfortunately, both because it fell under the old PS rules and, more importantly, because it probably was (or could be reasonably argued to be) a genuine administrative error by the Fee Payer. As noted earlier, there are already mechanisms to fix PAYE errors (Reg. 72). That said, I don't think this is what the legislation intended (but then it was all about HMRC getting their money, not about the downstream consequences, which were largely ignored as "commercial decisions" to which eek and I both expressed amazement when we first learned about that interpretation).

Really, the best thing you can do is to write to your MP. This is precisely the sort of constituency casework that MPs engage with, day to day, so that really is your best avenue.

Forget about IPSE or other membership organisations or some sort of coordinated effort (for now) because organisations like IPSE are ships - they take too long to turn and they often crash into the dock.

[malvolio]

What double taxation? The entire problem is the tax bill sits with the Fee Payer and the Fee Payer is trying to offload it to the poor contractor.

If IPSE are talking about double taxation then (once again) they haven't got the first clue what the issue is..

Mind you, that's obvious from the utter crap they posted about umbrellas following their last meetup see February’s Member Meet-Up: A call for views on regulating the umbrella market | IPSE

1) Its not a surprise that some umbrellas charge extra to process SIPP payments. The ones that do are usually £30 cheaper than the ones that process SIPP payments within their fees. 30 seconds of research would tell you that
2) some SIPP providers won't deal with umbrella firms (because their legal advice says it needs to be directors) and some umbrellas won't deal with SIPP providers who insist on direct debits.
3) training costs - again do some research and you would know that what they are asking for just isn't legally possible...

I could come up with a whole set of issues regarding umbrellas and none of the items IPSE care about would feature in the top 10....

Just for the record I gave up on IPSE as a force for change some time ago.

As far as I can make out, their concept of "double taxation" is the fee payer having to cough to HMRC the taxes now due from a corrected wrong assessment while not repaying the taxes already paid by the contractor believing they were outside IR35. If so, that is really the other side of the transfer of liability argument.

Both, imvho, need addressing.

[eek]

Just for the record I gave up on IPSE as a force for change some time ago.

As far as I can make out, their concept of "double taxation" is the fee payer having to cough to HMRC the taxes now due from a corrected wrong assessment while not repaying the taxes already paid by the contractor believing they were outside IR35. If so, that is really the other side of the transfer of liability argument.

Both, imvho, need addressing.

But there won't be any double taxation in most cases.

If the contractor's company ends up repaying the agency - the company will run a loss for that period which would be reflected in a future corporation tax bill

If the contractor doesn't end up paying the tax then the tax paid will be correct at a company level but wrong on a personal level (depending on how that plays out may or may not impact the contractor personally - there are multiple options here so I'm not running through all of them).

If that's the IPSE's concern then they are even more clueless than they used to be.