New Tax Avoidance Scheme - Utilising CGT & ER

[eek]

Not everyone takes advice, especially if they are naïve, greedy or just plain stupid - especially since 2008/9.

I used to contract in an IB a few years ago where dozens of contractors were using one scheme or another, for example Steed, as well as a host of others that have no doubt long since disappeared. A contractor who had been using a Ltd was tempted to join a very dodgy looking scheme (their website even had numerous spelling mistakes!) and this was around 2008 when the whole DOTAS thing was taking off.

I strongly advised her against this and explained why, but my warning was not heeded; she had already been blinded by the promise of 90% returns and the fact that 'everyone else was doing it'. I hate to think what has become of them all now.

The above is why I've never (unlike others on here) attacked members of a scheme. The amount of pressure you are under when everyone else is using a scheme meant you would need to be really tough not to join one...

It's also why I think HMRC are responsible for part of this mess. Warnings should have been on their website years ago....

[MrMarkyMark]

Not everyone takes advice, especially if they are naïve, greedy or just plain stupid - especially since 2008/9.

I used to contract in an IB a few years ago where dozens of contractors were using one scheme or another, for example Steed, as well as a host of others that have no doubt long since disappeared. A contractor who had been using a Ltd was tempted to join a very dodgy looking scheme (their website even had numerous spelling mistakes!) and this was around 2008 when the whole DOTAS thing was taking off.

I strongly advised her against this and explained why, but my warning was not heeded; she had already been blinded by the promise of 90% returns and the fact that 'everyone else was doing it'. I hate to think what has become of them all now.

Funnily enough I was always told by a number of my peers that I was an idiot for not doing it.
Unsure how it all worked out for them eventually

It's also why I think HMRC are responsible for part of this mess. Warnings should have been on their website years ago....

Absolutely.

The real issue for me is changing the law, then taxing retrospectively.
It would hold more weight if they went for some of the bigger players, anyone listed in the Panama papers for example.

[DotasScandal]

It's also why I think HMRC are responsible for part of this mess. Warnings should have been on their website years ago....

They are not only responsible, they are fully complicit. Why? because by their actions (or rather lack thereof), they validated the scheme promoters' narrative.
"Contractor schemes" were created as a reaction to the misguided IR35 legislation, all right. But they would have remained a marginal thing had HMRC lifted a finger and produced BACK THEN one of these cutesy little "tempted by tax avoidance?" leaflets that they send to every contractor and their dog lately.
By looking the other way, HMRC validated the promoters' narrative that "HMRC is ok with it", thus prompting contractors to recommend schemes to other contractors, resulting in the whole "industry" booming exponentially (no doubt beyong the promoters' wildest dreams!).
This proliferation could have been trivially easy to stop dead in its tracks, if it wasn't for the complacency/incompetence/complicity of HM's services.
This is the can of worms that they don't want opened.
It explains why they are so busy trying to organise a cover-up from which there will be no coming back, and why anything goes: retrospection, lies, revisionism, exceptional "2019" charges.
It's a tough job though, with some 30K witnesses to silence (some of which won't shut up, or even - imagine that - insist on exercising their legal rights)

[missinggreenfields]

A contractor who had been using a Ltd was tempted to join a very dodgy looking scheme (their website even had numerous spelling mistakes!)

Was it this one?