Self-employed earners (i.e. sole traders or partners) over the age of 16 and below state retirement age are currently liable to both Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance contributions (NICs) unless specifically excepted by provisions contained in the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992.

Former Chancellor, George Osborne, made proposals to abolish Class 2 NICs and reform the system for paying Class 4 NICs. The proposals were designed to simplify the tax system for the self-employed and offer them more equal access to contributory benefits. However, the…

HMRC have published a document entitled Making Tax Digital Research – Attitudes, Behaviour and Engagement, which reports on research undertaken to help HMRC understand how individual customers and agents respond to the core principles of MTD. The key objectives of the research were to explore:

– individual customers’ and agents’ overall attitudes and expectations of the elements of MTD that may affect them;
– levers and barriers that may influence engagement with MTDi; and
– anticipated impacts and experiences across different individual customer groups of moving to MTD.

Is summary, the…

An increasing number of individuals are finding work through online platforms (for example Deliveroo and Uber workers), usually on a self-employed basis, whereas in the past they might have been employees whose relatively simple tax affairs were dealt with under PAYE. The Office for Tax Simplification (OTS) has published a paper entitled Platforms, the Platform economy and Tax Simplification, which explores the possibility of re-creating for them, in the context of self-employment, an arrangement that looks and feels more similar to that of an employee from an…

Certain sole traders and partnerships may benefit from using HMRC’s simplified expenses regime to calculate business expenses for vehicles, working from home and living on the business premises.

Currently, businesses can either calculate expenses by working out the actual costs, or use HMRC’s published flat rates.

HMRC’s checker can be used to work out which method will produce the most favourable result.

The checker asks the user to make estimates about some of their business expenses.

However, the tool:

– does not give exact figures to use in the individual’s your tax…

Measures to help taxi drivers to buy cleaner vehicles, remove barriers for investment in the oil and gas industry, and tackle tax avoidance using profit fragmentation are just some of the key policies that will be legislated for in the Finance Bill 2018-19, which was published in draft on 6 July 2018.

Under the Government’s new timetable, the draft legislation has been published now for consultation purposes until 31 August 2018. It will become Finance Act 2019, when it receives Royal Assent in March 2019, so the new law…