Horizon-Tec

[DonkeyRhubarb]

Hi DR,

Yes. I've read a lot of your posts, and can see you've been round the houses with this.

So to summarise what you just said, appreciating that you're not a tax adviser but have boned up on the issue:

if they go the full mile, win in court close the scheme, claim back tax etc, then they can claim tax, NIC,s interest and penalties.

But I can't get a definitive answer to whether 2/12/2004 is as far back as they can claim. (Maybe I'm asking too much since not a lot seems to be definitive at the moment). But that's how it seems to me.

So my nightmare scenario is that I get to pensionable age, am just about to sit back and relax and then HMRC come knocking about 12 years from now with a big bill, and my retirement plans go out the window. A way to avoid the interest is to but a CTD now, which seems to me to bypass how long any legislation may take to become law (the 12 years from now scenario).

Any thoughts?

2/12/2004 is a bit of a red herring, since that announcement was only in the context of retrospective legislation, not litigation.

Assuming that HMRC/Treasury don't try to change the law retrospectively in a Budget to close the Horizon scheme, then any challenge will be through the courts.

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be anything to stop HMRC sitting on something for years before taking any action. In fact, that's how they got in such a mess with the BN66 schemes. Instead of legislating as soon as they became aware of them, they sat on their arses for 5 years and did nothing until it got completely out of hand.

A CTD would be one way to stop the interest mounting. Alternatively you could consider investing it in some way in the hope of outpacing the interest they charge (bank base + 2.5%).

[pimpernell]

2/12/2004 is a bit of a red herring, since that announcement was only in the context of retrospective legislation, not litigation.

Ah. Now that's exactly what I mean. Why is it all so difficult? Xoggoth mentioned a 'four year' rule coming in on another thread:

But how does that fit with the general rules, coming in soon, that liability is limited to 4 years if there is no fraud or carelessness? If you accepted advice from bona fide companies who supplied schemes based on proper legal and accounting wisdom at the time how could you be called careless?

First I've heard of this.

So. Not that I'm admitting anything, but just say I wanted to get the COP8 settled in my own mind, How the f&&k can I predict how much they wil lask for if I don't know the parameters?

[centurian]

In theory, it is also possible for them to impose penalties as well as interest, although they haven't done this with BN66 because the scheme was fully disclosed on our tax returns.

A small mercy I guess and this is often double the amount (plus interest).

So how much worse off are you, compared to if you had paid tax and NI on the earnings. Presumably the interest rate is higher than any investments.

Also are your fees to the scheme providers being factored in - or is this money considered lost.