Archive:September 2018

Please find below all the articles from September 2018.

HMRC consult on BIK changes

Monday, September 3, 2018

Following the recent consultation covering the taxation of employee expenses (as announced in the Autumn 2017 Budget), draft Finance Bill 2018-19 contains proposals to amend some of the existing rules concerning travel and subsistence payments.

BSRs and OCRs

Currently, there are no income tax or NIC implications where an employer uses HMRC’s approved benchmark scale rates (BSR) to pay or reimburse employees’ qualifying expenses incurred when travelling for work. The BSRs are designed to cover modest meal allowances with which employers can reimburse their staff for food and drink…

MTD research published

Monday, September 3, 2018

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…

VAT treatment of vouchers

Monday, September 3, 2018

A summary of responses to HMRC’s consultation on VAT and vouchers was published on 6 July 2018. The consultation sought views about proposed new rules for the VAT treatment of vouchers and gift cards. The consultation focussed on how an EU directive, providing for the VAT treatment of vouchers, should be transposed into UK law. Broadly, the EU Vouchers Directive (Council Directive (EU) 2016/1065) was agreed on 27 June 2017 and legislates for a common VAT treatment of vouchers across the EU. It applies to any vouchers…

OTS proposals new online PAYE platform

Monday, September 3, 2018

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…