IR35 Insurance - have Qdos ever paid out?

[rootsnall]

The benefits of insurance?

Arguably none. After all they have never needed to pay out, always win thus there is no benefit.

Arguably lots. When an enquiry is started they are very rarely concluded by you simply writing back to the status inspector saying "sorry, guv, but you're wrong". A full tax investigation (be it for IR35 or anything else) becomes a very time consuming process. If you handle it yourself you will likely lose - because they often centre on highly technical arguments. If you take proper advice it can get very expensive very quickly. I personally spent in the order of 10k fees over a 3 year period. If I also factor in the lost billable time due to mettings with HMIT, advisors and correspondence the actual cost to me was effectively about 30k.

Only an individual decide if it is worthwhile to them. If you have average luck then over time you will pay more. However your view may well change after you have had an enquiry started.

I think the original post was talking about is it worth insuring for the actual payout ( NI + penalties ) if you lose, rather than insuring for the costs of any investigation. I think most contractors are insured for the cost of getting expert advice ( via PCG or otherwise ) but few are covered for the actual payout. PCG+ is the only insurance I have ever bothered with. My strategy has always been to limit how long you are at any one client and then if you do come a cropper you can afford to take the hit if you lose case. ie. don't be like the guy at the AA with the 99K bill

[Qdos Contractor]

Sorry for the delayed response - not sure how I missed this.

I can understand why you would eye an insurance provider with a certain amount of suspicion. I also agree that the incumbent policy wording is perhaps a little ambiguous in places (as stated, it covers all of our tax insurances) and I can confirm that we are in the process of revising them all - they'll obviously be made public as soon as they're complete.

But...

We aren't a typical insurance provider - the policies we offer have been built on the back of our experience and expertise. We have dealt with over 1,300 status enquiries and in all my years at the company I can't think of one occasion where we've even thought about pulling out of defending one. We employ ex-inspectors who happily take on any status case that comes our way and they would be aghast if someone accused them of attempting to wriggle out of dealing with it.

The TLC35 policy is a fairly unique product and the nature of IR35 means it's quite difficult to definitively confirm someone's working practices. However, we ask contractors to give us their reasonable opinion on their circumstances. The only reason we'd pull out of a case is if there was a blatant misrepresentation on the application - for instance if you were previously an employee of your client but ticked that you weren't.

If we ever acted unreasonably in a tax case I would fully expect the contractor involved to kick up a right stink on forums like this. I don't think you'll be able to find any previous occurrences and we've been doing this for a long, long time.

I'm more than happy to answer any specific queries on the policy, either in this thread or by email/PM.