Official: IR35 is here to stay
March 24th, 2011So, now we know: the Chancellor’s Budget documents make it clear that IR35 is here to stay. However, there is also a clear commitment to improving its administration by HMRC, in accord with one of the options raised by the OTS small business tax review.
A dedicated helpline staffed by tax specialists is to be set up and new guidance will be published clarifying the cases which HMRC consider to be beyond the scope of IR35. Furthermore, target compliance activity will restrict reviews to high risk cases and HMRC’s new approach will be closely monitored by a new IR35 Forum. The government appears to have taken heed of warnings in the OTS review that suspension of IR35 would jeopardise substantial amounts in revenue.
IR35 was introduced by the previous Labour administration in 2000 to prevent “disguised employment” by workers who received payments from clients through their own limited companies. Treated as dividends, these payments were not subject to National Insurance Contributions (NICs). Further evasions could be secured by splitting ownership of limited companies between family members, a tactic designed to reduce tax due by placing the income into lower tax bands. It should be noted that few owners of limited companies took these questionable actions, but many became subject to suspicion when IR35 became law.
Commenting on the decision to retain IR35, Crystal Umbrella’s Director of Service Delivery, Scott Illingworth, said that outright abolition at this stage would have created a policy vacuum, with no regulation at all. “This would almost certainly have led to a significant rise in non-compliance”, he added, resulting in an “even worse predicament than is the case now with an unreformed IR35 in place”.
Tags: Contractors, IR35, Recruitment, Tax, tax laws, Umbrella Companies
