In broad terms, the Employment Allowance (EA) is available to most employers and should enable them to reduce the amount of National Insurance Contributions (NICs) they have to pay by up to £3,000 per year. The eligibility rules changed from April 2016, and the Autumn Budget 2018 announced further changes expected to take effect from April 2020. It is worth checking to make sure that a limited company is still eligible to benefit from this tax incentive.

Employers may generally claim the EA if they are a business (including…

The VAT rules for businesses suppling digital services to private consumers in other member states change with effect from 1 January 2019.

From that date, the place of supply will be the UK where both:

– a UK business is not established in any other EU member state; and
– the total value of cross-border digital sales is less than £8,818 in the current and preceding calendar years.

Businesses affected will no longer need to register for VAT in other EU countries where they have consumers or use the VAT Mini One…

Autumn Budget 2018 announced a new measure, designed to counter fraud in the construction industry, which has seen gangs of criminal traders artificially extending the chain of supply of labour services, then failing to account for all the output VAT due to HMRC by collecting the VAT on the supplies (sales) and then going “missing” before passing the VAT on to HMRC.

The proposed change, which is scheduled to take effect from 1 October 2019, will mean that for certain specified supplies of construction services, the customer will be…

HMRC have published a series of warnings that university students are being targeted by scammers with fake tax refunds in an effort to steal money and personal details.

The scammers are using seemingly legitimate university email addresses (for example ‘@uc.ac.uk’) in order to avoid detection, and HMRC have received thousands of fraud reports from students at colleges across the UK.

This is the first time HMRC has seen a tax scam attack directly targeting university students in such high volumes.

HMRC never inform people about potential tax refunds by email, text…

According to recent research undertaken by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), over 40% of businesses that will be affected by Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT are not yet aware of it. With only six months to go until MTD goes live for some businesses in April 2019, HMRC have only recently launched a major communications campaign to try and build awareness amongst small businesses.

The ICAEW survey also shows that although there has been a significant increase in the number of businesses now…